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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Category Archives: The Lesser Blog
Three Carnegie Nights
And it would have been four, except that I couldn’t face going out to the same concert venue four nights in a row; even I have my limits. So I skipped the very tempting Ensemble ACJW performance that was scheduled for … Continue reading
Oops
Three months between error and correction is an awfully long time, and occasionally more than one issue passes before I discover my mistakes, so I’ve decided to use this blog entry to rectify some of the errors I’ve made in … Continue reading
Thrilling Television
I’ve just finished watching the first season of The Americans (okay, so I’m late to the party), and I can barely wait for Season Two to become available. This is the most exciting new show I’ve seen since Breaking Bad … Continue reading
Two Book Recommendations
One of the nice things about running a literary magazine is that you get advance copies of many books, arriving for free at your doorstep. I have always taken full advantage of this gift. At the end of each workday, … Continue reading
Why I Read
This is just to let you know that my new book, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, is out today from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I feel a bit abashed at tooting my own horn, but if I … Continue reading
A Japanese Novelist
Why are we not all reading Natsume Soseki? Last year I was introduced to his best-known novel, Kokoro, by a professor of Japanese literature at Berkeley. It was terrific and I was grateful, though not so grateful as to immediately … Continue reading
Perfect Beckett
It’s been over two weeks since I saw the British production of All That Fall at 59E59, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Rarely have I seen a Beckett play performed so movingly or so delicately. What Trevor … Continue reading
News Flash
It turns out—to no one’s great surprise—that Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, now a quarter-century old, is as amazing as it ever was. In fact, like many of the best works of art, it seems to have accumulated … Continue reading
The Pacificas (Again)
I’ve already had my say, at length, about how great the Pacifica Quartet is, so when I set off for their Zankel concert last night, my only intention was to listen for the pleasure of it. The performance was so … Continue reading
Arcangelo
Going to hear a musical group you’ve never heard before always entails a risk, but the risk tends to be less with Baroque music, which—if it is played at all—is usually played at a fairly high standard. The risks in … Continue reading