Vivian Gornick said "What happens to the writer isn't important. It's the arger sense that the writer makes out of what happened that matters. And for this an imagination is required."

This piece lacks imagination or at least an imaginative treatment of the story. It happened, big deal, so what?

The letters piling up aren't about the piece as much as they are about the issue, which is perpetually controversial.

Let's hope the second two hours of this season are filled with nail-biting suspense, Heather, because the first two were duds, with too much set-up. Not just duds, but bad enough to make me long for Kim and the cougar. Well, almost.

Yes, Jack is superhuman and cartoonish and I buy that. Yes, 24 is wild, frantic, over-heated and sometimes silly, but doesn't usually pile up so many weaknesses and incongruities, like

1--weak dialogue. "I'm not some idealistic flag-burning--" Who talks like that, and what the hell does it mean, and how did it apply to the point at hand?

2--No FBI agent would arrest the President's sister, sorry. Not believable.

3--Jack is always right. All the other characters who have interacted with Jack before know this. Why didn't they listen? Just for the sake of moving the story along. Tacky.

4--What administration would make a deal with terrorists without looking more deeply at their motives?

5--What administration would give its intel and security info over to terrorists without some kind of back-up?

6--Two doors are kicked open in this first two hours with just one kick. Front doors of houses? Jive jive jive.

I'll keep watching, but I'm worried that the show's amazing success has turned the heads of its writers.

How nice to see someone not kowtow to this clichéd and fatally flawed movie. It asks us to care for a kid devoted to beauty pageants we as a culture have been taught to loathe for the way they twist young children and turn parents into egomaniacal monsters. It thinks we'd believe a grandfather would teach such a risque and age-inappropriate routine to his granddaughter, and then halfway it completely violates its own reality when a death that would require only a phone call for all steps to be taken (it was "pre-arranged" according to the script) becomes a--supposedly--comic plot device to crank up the voyage. It even makes a book on Proust (!) a national bestseller, and the list goes on. Dumb, dumb, dumb--and it's a sign of desperation that critics have been crawling up this movie's ass. As a writer, I found the script banal, dishonest, and frantic. I thought the script writers were hacks, but clever ones, because they seem to have convinced everyone they're terrific.

Dear Joan:

I'm sorry to hear that you love Chris Mathews. That's as misguided an attraction as his is for men he finds macho--surely you remember his gushing about Ahnuld? But his incompetence as a commentator runs deeper than any psychological quirks of his makeup.

The other night, watching Mathews and other Beltway nudnicks, I saw them behave like mean-spirited adolescents, and it's not the first time. When the subject of Al Gore came up, their collective wisdom was--? That he was too fat to run for President, but you'd know he was running if you saw him buying Slimfast. The joke dragged on, and the sniggering was beyond tacky, it was revolting, with Mathews was at its center.

He's been an excellent supporting actor in a number of films--The Madness of King George, Another Country, Shakespeare in Love--but his talent has never seemed very deep. And I wonder if what's really dished his career has been his looks and his having been a Calvin Klein model. Hard to take someone like that seriously. Maybe it's time for him to host a reality series: So You Want to Act?

Yes, that's exactly it. Molly Ivins never struck me was malicious no matter how angry or outrage she was, only intent on exposing hypocrisy. She was a voice of justice, sometimes fierce, sometime warmly humorous. Here's where she and columnists like Maureen Dowd differ. Dowd's malice often spoils her critiques, making them exercises in contempt and self-regard. The way she pointlessly went after Howard Deean's wife is a prime example. With Ivins, it didn't feel so personal, so barbed, so fraught--she had a larger vision and a kinder spirit. She was a humanitarian; Dowd and her ilk often feel more like spoiled brats.

We couldn't pry our eyes away from her?

That's anything but the truth. I found her grotesque and pathetic, a cartoon of a vamp, untalented, uninteresting, unworthy of a moment's notice. When I saw her on a screen, I turned to another channel. Always. And I never even cared to understand why a corrupt entertainment media gave her a spotlight.

Hell, I'd even choose dreary and portentous Wolf Blitzer in the Nudnick Room over Smith.

He at least offers viewers some belly laughs when he intones the self-important intro to his show. Smith just struck me as humiliating herself and everyone around her.

We couldn't pry our eyes away from her?

That's anything but the truth. I found her grotesque and pathetic, a cartoon of a vamp, untalented, uninteresting, unworthy of a moment's notice. When I saw her on a screen, I turned to another channel. Always. And I never even cared to understand why a corrupt entertainment media gave her a spotlight.

Hell, I'd even choose dreary and portentous Wolf Blitzer in the Nudnick Room over Smith.

He at least offers viewers some belly laughs when he intones the self-important intro to his show. Smith just struck me as humiliating herself and everyone around her.

We have hit hit absolute rock bottom when a talentless nobody like Smith can be called a "star." Salon is sharing in media corruption and stupidity by obsessing about Smith, and acting as if she was important and a major fixture of American culture, pop or otherwise.