NOW YOU LIKE IT, NOW YOU DON’T

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s literary anthropology article (“Now, Gentle Readers,” Sept. 15) is the cleverest, most deftly thoughtful article you have published in ages. It is also a sadly accurate commentary on movie industry folks, who operate according to what they call “Hollywood standards”--that is, no standards at all.

How better to expose the emptiness and incivility, the lack of grace and intellectual rigor that characterize so much of the film community and most of its products than by the hand of a civilized 19th century philologist, oddly familiar with the difference between the abstract and the concrete, between a celluloid “pretty woman” and a human being?

Patricia McCarthy

Burbank

I was frustrated by your literary anthropology article. After reading the introduction a couple of times, I quit trying to decipher the topic of this esoteric piece.

In fact, there have been a number of other articles in the magazine lately that have been what I suppose you’d consider “stylistic” writing.

Please don’t become a New Yorker type of magazine.

Clinton Yap

yap123@aol.com