March 30, 2008
John S. Koppel, belletrist
John S. Koppel of Bethesda, Md., has a letter to the arts editor in today’s NY Times.
Re “Phenom Director Goes to War” by Katrina Onstad [March 23]:Unremarkable, in itself, except that it’s his 79th letter published in the Times since 2001. While Felicia Nimue Ackerman may outpace him, he covers broader ground, from Iraq to Jerry Seinfeld to Katrina to “erotic dancing.”Your article states that the subject of “Stop-Loss,” the Iraq war, “has yet to seduce audiences.”
Perhaps this is because, although they may well recognize that the Iraq war is a disastrous misadventure, audiences nonetheless seek out movies chiefly to be entertained rather than to be lectured and propagandized by a collection of Hollywood film industry types whom they perceive as smug, self-righteous, overprivileged and somewhat decadent, and whose lives bear scant resemblance to their own.
Ackerman is a philosophy professor, so writing about ice-cream sundaes is what she’s paid to do. Koppel is a DOJ lawyer, and I doubt that Annie Leibovitz is a person of interest to Justice. And Louis Jay Herman took up letter writing only in his retirement.
Why blog when the Times will print your every idle thought?
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