In addition to my intermittent entries on this blog, I have had a sideline over the past few years writing for a multi-authored site, the National Arts Journalism Program’s ARTicles blog. About twenty-five arts journalists, including me, were drafted into service to write for it occasionally, and we duly did so. Then, sometime around last summer, ARTicles (which had never been exactly a hotbed of activity) began to limp toward near-extinction. I felt slightly guilty, as well as anxious to keep this good thing going, so in October I volunteered to write a full month of daily blogs. Since I was in New York for the fall, I knew I would have plenty to write about. What I didn’t know was that Hurricane Sandy would become part of the story. So the arts blog I was writing became, perforce, an island survival blog—and even when it eventually morphed back into an arts blog, some remnants of the trials we Lower Manhattanites had all endured persisted in infusing themselves into my reports.
Shortly after my month of blogging came to an end, the National Arts Journalism Program disbanded and ARTicles was terminated. In other words, near-extinction became extinction. But the archive remains up for anyone to read, so I thought I would direct my Lesser Blog readers to the site, in case anyone is interested in this curious experiment. Like most blogs, the NAJP site places the latest entry at the top. I would recommend, though, that you go back to the start of my month, on October 22
http://www.najp.org/articles/2012/10/morris-and-ratmansky.html
or even to October 11, when I announced my blogging intentions
http://www.najp.org/articles/2012/10/blogging-for-real.html
if you want to get the full flavor of the narrative. In either case, you can simply click on the Next button to move forward chronologically.
The entire archive is available at http://www.najp.org/articles/archives.html
—January 6, 2013