Mia on the "Seminal American Novelist" Philip Roth - me and my signed book

Among the many odd and seemingly pointless TWEETS on TWITTER today...

Mia Farrow telling her fans (and her thousands of adopted kids) that Philip Roth "the Seminal American Novelist has died."

That's almost word-for-word, the header for the link she posted: "...the seminal American novelist, who has died..."

My guess is that she didn't know Roth all that well? Had no first-hand experiences with him? Didn't have a ghostwriter handy so she could at least put in one original line of copy?

The New Yorker is where her son (not the one by FRANK SINATRA) currently works, with a seeming army of editors and researchers at his command. Nepotism IS lovely. He got the gig after his metrosexual looks and famous last name won him his own TV show. But, since it relied mostly on his personality and voice, which is sort of Barbie meets Capote, it failed.

Roth, you might recall, wrote an entire Kafkaesque novel in 1972 about a guy who turns into a breast. Noting the schadenfreude of the zeitgeist, and be mindful of all tropes (I'm talking NEW YORKER-ese here), I'll add that this was the same year Woody Allen filmed a giant breast running amilk...er, amok, in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex."

Mr. Roth was a hot author at the time, having startled the world with the literally seminal novel "Portnoy's Complaint." Woody, had simply distilled the topic to a one-liner: "Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with somebody I love."

(I add parenthetically that I never met Philip Roth. I only saw him once. It was at Zabar's. There was a guy who regularly assembled a wooden table in front of the store, and sold new and used books from this sidewalk perch. What was odd, was that he had a big display of signed Philip Roth books, which he proudly sold "at list price." I got the idea Roth had to live somewhere in the neighborhood, and apparently was taking pity on this book dealer. And sure enough, I recognized Roth as he stood near the dealer and asked, "Did you sell many copies?" I was tempted to be a goofball and chase after Roth to tell him how important his books were to me, but I figured he'd heard it before. I bought a signed book instead. Later, I learned that the book dealer was Roth's brother.] It's nice that Mia Farrow isn't so completely down on sexy Jewish-American humorists that she would ignore Philip Roth entirely. Unless...what she wrote is really a disguised one-liner, like "Philip Roth, the Seminal American Novelist, Has Died." With GOOD. Left out at the last minute.

You never know, do you? I mean, the woman may not like Philip Roth at all and be glad he's dead. She may have written her one-liner and would tell you she had NO idea it was plagiarized word for word. Who could possibly question the motives of Mia Farrow?