Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman

What We Learned from Aesthetic Realism

George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”—Profound & Playful

Originally presented at an Aesthetic Realism seminar: "What Can We Learn from Music about Our Lives?"

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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

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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."

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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?  […]