Keillor on New Yorker

* I disagree completely with Garrison Keillor’s comments (April 4) about the New Yorker and his response to the Annie Leibovitz photographs in the April 3 issue. I was mildly outraged when I heard she was in town “shooting the Simpson trial.” I was annoyed when I saw “The faces of the Simpson trial” in the index of the magazine. But the series says more about what has been going on here than 14 pages of text could have--the chosen shots and how they are arranged are a sad but accurate commentary on a society, the media and a legal system run a muck. Each picture conveys something about the priorities of those involved.

And if Paula Barbieri posed for that picture with full knowledge that it was to be used in a spread about the trial, then she is even more pathetic than was previously evident; she and Simpson deserve each other. Only the final photo of the Goldman family evokes the sense of heart-wrenching tragedy that brought about this trial. The victims have in fact been largely forgotten. If Leibovitz eventually publishes a similarly wordless book on the subject, it may well be the definitive work on the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.

PATRICIA McCARTHY

Burbank

*

It isn’t only the April 3 issue of the new New Yorker that this 50-years-plus fan of the magazine finds objectionable.

The covers, once timely and clever, are now tawdry; The Talk of the Town section of narrow interest; the colored comic-book drawings along the edges of the pages an offense to the literary content; the loss of Elizabeth Drew’s wonderful letters from Washington and Andy Logan’s from New York unforgivable.

Only once in the two years of Tina Brown’s editorship has it been worth the subscription price: the printing of a selection of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “No Ordinary Time,” which sent us to the bookstore for her book and to her local lecture, is the kind of enlightening push the old New Yorker provided frequently to its readers.

E.M. BUTTERWORTH

Claremont