About
I decided to start a blog for three reasons:
1) People felt that there should be a part of the Threepenny website that was available only online, not in the printed magazine.
2) Some of the things I wanted to write about seemed as if they would benefit from a slightly more timely response than our usual quarterly publication permitted.
3) I was seeing and hearing so much interesting art — especially in the areas of dance and music, though also in literature, theater, and the visual arts — that I couldn't fit everything I wanted to say into The Threepenny Review without taking over the whole publication. And if you are not Diderot or Karl Kraus (and I am certainly neither), it is never a good idea to write the whole magazine yourself. But I figured the rules of blogs would allow me to monopolize one of those.
I struggled to come up with a good title for the blog and at first resisted using my own name, feeling (as those named Lesser are bound to feel) that diminishment is not necessarily a selling point. But then I figured that if people named Grudge or Drudge can use their names on websites, I should certainly not be abashed at calling this The Lesser Blog. So here it is, and I hope you enjoy it.
Wendy Lesser
Editor, The Threepenny Review-
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Author Archives: Wendy Lesser
Teaching the Arts
This past fall I taught a course called “New York and the Arts” at Hunter. My students were freshmen in the CUNY Honors College, which meant that, on the basis of their academic promise, they had all been granted a … Continue reading
Dream Opera
There is something about Handel’s operas and oratorios that stimulates an astute inventiveness in modern-day directors. Or so it seems, at any rate, from the five fully staged productions I’ve attended in the last three years. Of these, one was … Continue reading
A Different Kind of Reality Show
Last night I saw a rather amazing movie called Paper Dolls. If I told you it was a documentary about Filipino transvestites taking care of old people in Israel, you would think you didn’t want to see it. But you would … Continue reading
Javier Marías’s Dance and Dream
This past week I’ve been reading Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream, the second volume in his projected trilogy, which New Directions, his regular American publishers, are bringing out in this country. If you’ve never read any Javier Marías, … Continue reading
Mark Morris and the Idea of Camp
I would never have thought to put the two together. But that is my point: we hardcore admirers of Mark Morris’s choreography see nothing at all campy about it, and yet many other viewers (including some people who like his … Continue reading