Kurt Cobain’s Suicide

* Bob Guccione Jr. gave an explanation and a sort of qualified apology for Kurt Cobain’s agony (Commentary, April 15). But a point stands out that Guccione failed to make: Cobain had more passion for his art--music he should have abandoned if he couldn’t tolerate the fame that went with it--than he felt for Courtney Love or his daughter. This is narcissism, an essential ingredient of psychosis. There is nothing profound about Cobain’s behavior. He simply stepped through the looking glass: He went insane.

LARRY D. LYONS

Long Beach

* Cobain is no more a symbol of his “troubled generation” than Jack London, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath or Ernest Hemingway were of theirs. A certain percentage of creative, successful geniuses have always been troubled, addicted and suicidal, and they will continue to be so.

KATHY A. PRICE

Santa Barbara

* Re “Cobain Reached People Who Had a Lot to Be Mad About,” Platform, April 14: Kathleen M. O’Connell, a senior in a prestigious university, has very little to be mad about. No one has forced her pampered, so-called Angry Generation to live the lives that put them at risk. The kids at Sarajevo--now they really “have a lot to be mad about.”

JERRY COWLE

Pacific Palisades

* I’m really sick of the whining negativism of so-called Generation X (Platform). Why didn’t someone instead name them Generation Hope, and maybe they would have run with it? Stop embracing this negative chic and get on with the business of living your life! There are myriad things to be positive about in this country. Go to Bosnia if you want a taste of death and despair!

JANET S. GOSSE

Laguna Hills