The blade of certainty and the smoke of doubt. — Eli Siegel, “Prosody Is Ours” The way men are decisive and indecisive has confused and even tormented us—it did me. I learned there can be a good kind of indecision in a man that comes from his desire to know, the thing in him that […]
George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”—Profound & Playful
Originally presented at an Aesthetic Realism seminar: "What Can We Learn from Music about Our Lives?"
George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was first performed by him in a concert with the Paul Whiteman orchestra on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1924. We’re hearing a recording from 1927, with Gershwin himself at the piano and in an arrangement for jazz band created by Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s chief arranger. The sound of this […]
Jackie Gleason & Two Kinds of Anger
Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism have explained something completely new about an emotion that troubles people very much—anger. We have two kinds of anger, one makes us strong and the other makes us weak. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #188, Mr. Siegel writes: Aesthetic Realism says that a good anger has […]
A Wife’s Unseen Battle: Do I Hope to Like Things—or Be Displeased?
Originally presented at an Aesthetic Realism seminar in NYC, with a discussion of Katherine Mansfield's short story, "The Escape."
One lovely fall evening, as I was home making a deep-dish apple pie, I reached up into the cabinet for my flour sifter, but it wasn’t there. “Did someone move my sifter?,” I yelled out in displeasure. Since there were only two cats and one other person in the apartment, who could have moved it? […]
Roughness & Grace in “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”
A recording I love is the great Louis Armstrong singing “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” by George and Ira Gershwin. His solo rendition comes in the midst of a duet with Ella Fitzgerald from the 1956 album Ella & Louis, one of my all-time favorites. And I think the very opposites we studied […]