Michael Hollingsworth writes:
"Dear Dr. M.: you're directly on target when you claim that Woody Allen and Philip Roth are the same person, but you've unaccountably omitted to mention the most pressing evidence.The year: 1972. Philip Roth published The Breast, a fantasy about a writer transformed into one. Woody Allen released Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, in which a giant female breast wreaks havoc upon the countryside. Obviously, both "Roth" and "Allen" had recently read Gogol's The Nose and Kafka's Metamorphosis. Just as obviously, "both" of "them" were struggling with some seriously unresolved maternal issues. How fascinating that both of their boundless cups of creativity "runneth over" so to speak, in such similar ways. A coincidence? Hardly.
By the way, both "Roth's" and "Allen's" contributions are embarrassingly false and flat."
Dr. M. responds: "You know, Professor Hollingsworth, I think I support your breast remarks. I'd been aware of both of these upwellings of mammariness but I never put two and two together. If Roth/Allen aren't doppelgangers, they're certainly developing along twin tracks.
And let me add my own reservations: the short stories by Gogol and Kafka are untouchable contributions to world literature. Both writers create astonishing fantasies; they also manage to skewer the particularities of, in the one case, czarist Russia and in the other, early twentieth-century Prague. Frankly, neither Roth's nor Allen's breasts are anywhere nearly as full or pointed."
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