Here's that audiobook of "Anna Karenina." Listen to the sample before you spring for it. Famous actors are not necessarily the best book narrators. I was just saying I couldn't listen to Jennifer Jason Leigh narrating "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." American actresses tend to have casual, idiosyncratic speech patterns — good for dialogue but distracting or irritating for the long haul through descriptions and multiple characters.
Farrow is 33. Maybe that's the key age for worrying that you're not better read. "Waves of panic" sounds extreme, but maybe people — some people — are deeply distressed that they haven't read all the books it seems you're supposed to have read. If there's anyone I associate with that feeling, it's Woody Allen. Maybe fear of not having read the great Russian classics is a displaced communion with his estranged father. The How-I-Spend-My-Sundays piece of literary fluff does have a reference to Woody — a veiled reference:
One photo that’s definitely going up in this new apartment: an 8-by-10-inch glossy of Madonna in full cleavage-y glory that accompanied a letter she mailed me when I was 6. The year previous, Madonna had hung out with me a lot on a set in Queens where she was playing a trapeze artist in a movie with my mom, teaching me to roll down her fishnet stockings, so I learned that I was not straight. At that point she hadn’t yet had kids and clearly wanted kids.
There's a link on "a movie" and it goes to a NYT review of the Woody Allen movie "Shadows and Fog." There's also a photo of the letter Madonna sent 6-year-old Ronan, whose original name was Satchel. The article doesn't quote it, but I can transcribe it: "Hello Satchel/I miss you so please grow up soon so we can be married!/Love, Madonna."
That's all in good fun, Madonna telling a 6-year-old he must marry her. Imagine the uproar if Woody had written such a thing to a 6-year-old. And if he'd taught her to roll down his socks.
ADDED: By the way, Woody Allen's wonderful spoof of Russian literature, "Love and Death," is sometimes shown in a double feature with a film version of "Anna Karenina."
AND: Notice that he says he "learned that I was not straight" when he was 5 years old. Unexamined and out there to be seen by us is the portrayal of Madonna attempting to sexualize a 5-year-old. And the man looks back on that and does not condemn her but rather seems to revel in the unique opportunity he had to be sexualized by a sexy adult woman. He says he could see that he wasn't heterosexual because he didn't respond to her invitation to enjoy her sexiness. To say that he did not respond and that it meant he was gay is to interpret the interaction as sexual. As long as he's learning to read heavy novels, perhaps he could write something deep about his childhood experience and how he perceived and how that correlates to the way he understood what happened between his sister and his father.
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Ron writes:
"Nobody is straight, or gay when they're five, puberty hasn't kicked in yet."
You're making an assertion but what is the science there? Human beings can't perceive anything about sexual orientation until they reach puberty?
Hugh writes:
"Maybe this is addressed in the article which I have no interest in reading, but I think someone should tell Mr. Farrow that Kafka wasn’t Russian.
"Reminds me when my better Andrea MItchell, an English major, didn’t know that the phrase “The Sound and the Fury” comes from Shakespeare. We have a truly special media upper class here these days."
I respond:
I agree that someone could try to humiliate him over this, but the way I read it was: He's sensitive about his failure to have read the great novels, he's especially aware of the great Russian novelists and is currently working on one of the great Russian novels, but he wants to defend himself by saying that he has read at least some of the great classic literature, specifically Kafka.
He could have edited the writing to make that more clear and to protect himself from mockery, but maybe give him points for not being so prideful that he needed to do that.
Joe writes:
"I don't know if feeling something while rolling down Madonna's stocking is a great test of being gay or not. She doesn't do much for me, so by that metric I must be Paul Lynde."
Mary Ann says:
"Humblebrag!"
David writes:
"Ann, Maybe it was too long ago (I am now 57) but I seem to remember a time before puberty when a later heterosexual like myself thought girls were “icky." Age 5 or 6, really, Mr. Farrow?"
Ron writes:
"I didn;t know anything about my sexual orientation until I hit puberty. One day I was completely uninterested in sex, other than being curious about where babies came from, and then one day, bamn, I'm suddenly interested in girls. If some woman had asked me to roll down her stockings when I was 5 I probably would have had the attitude of yuck, no matter how hot the woman was. Once I hit puberty however, that attitude would have changed."
Tina writes:
"I do know an elderly woman whose daughter knew she was gay at five, or at least completely rejecting of and identifying with males. But there was abuse there too, and they are attuned to its effects. They are also both just glad this was before the whole transgender body mutilation and hormone thing was being forced on little children. The daughter is a completely un-neurotic, brilliant, cheerfully out lesbian and entirely closeted conservative Republican who despises woke culture. As do many of her closeted Republican gay friends.
"I don’t know how Mia Farrow gets away with letting an aging who-ware like Madonna write her six-year-old letters about dreaming about him dressed in pearls and how she wants to marry him, let alone having him roll Madonna’s fishnet stockings down at some striptease show. I’m suddenly seeing Taki Theodoracopulos’ argument against Mia Farrow in a different light.
"Then there’s the problematic name, Satchel, which Ronan changed at some point, wisely for his career. At first I thought Mia and Woody had named their black adopted son Satchel, and I found that creepy enough. But it’s even worse: daddy — purportedly Allen — and mommy Mia named their white, blue-eyed son Satchel? Isn’t that blackface? Or at least as irritating as all the people who call their children or dogs Atticus or Scout?
"Is there any part of this man’s life that hasn’t been fetish or self-aggrandizement? Yet the Madonna thing almost makes me want to forgive him for being the absolutely most insufferable person to ever appear in the often extremely insufferable ‘How I Spend My Sundays’ column. After reading it, I have to detox by reading the real estate column about couples choosing which crappy $900,000 + $2,000 per month maintenance, 600 square foot NYC apartment they’re going to buy, just to affirm my life choices."
Quaestor writes:
""American actresses tend to have casual, idiosyncratic speech patterns — good for dialogue…” if and only if the dialogue is written for a character who is a shoe-obsessed third-wave feminist from Bakersfield, California.
"I followed Althouse’s link to that Audible edition of Anna Karenina. My account shows it as a freebie, something I don’t fully understand. If it's free, is that an award for years of continuous Audible membership? Or is it free of charge because the source is in the public domain and therefore there’s no royalty owed to the author? Or is there a motive the management believes would be damaging to corporate interests if generally known to the customers?
"Free of charge as a customer loyalty premium strikes me as unlikely as there is no overt “in grateful appreciation of your loyalty” boilerplate attached anywhere on either the Amazon.com or Audible.com pages one would expect to emanate from a freebies-as-a-marketing-ploy motivation. Nor does the lack of owed royalties satisfy my curiosity. Though the 111th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s passing is fast approaching and all copyrights have long since lapsed, there are still substantial production and administrative costs to to recoup — the audio engineering and editing, cover art and graphic design, website administration, database administration, not to mention the narrator’s paycheck, which could be a one-time fee or a matter of royalties, or both. Consequently the zero sum headed to the eccentric nobleman or his heirs hardly accounts for the zero sum owed by me should I order that audiobook.
"However, one glance at the cover art explains it all. Who has top billing? Why, it’s Maggie Gyllenhaal, and in a a very prominent font, whereas poor Count Tolstoy is grudgingly mentioned near the bottom in a font only marginally larger than “performed by”. Performed by… all the other Audible narrators are mere drones in imminent danger of being made redundant by text-to-speech software, Ms. Maggie gives us a performance, and it’s only a lack of a suitable category that has denied her a well-earned Grammy… yeah, right. What we really have is a bid by a likely debt-burdened Gyllenhaal to migrate to a new career as her films stumble inexorably toward obscurity. (Hysteria, anyone? Sheesh.) I can just see her manager making the pitch — “We’ll waive all fees and subsidiary rights. You’ll love it! Just give her a chance.""
Carl writes:
""Famous actors are not necessarily the best book narrators."
"Maybe, but Claire Danes rocked The Handmaid's Tale."
I listened to a sample and I agree that she's doing a good job.
I like Ron Silver's narration of Philip Roth's books — "American Pastoral" and "I Married a Communist."
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