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Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

Leila Rosen, English Educator

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    • Being Important: What Does It Mean & What Mistakes Do We Make about It?
    • What Are Women Looking For in Love?
    • What’s Real Intelligence—about Ourselves & the World?
    • What, in a Woman Herself, Interferes with Love?
    • A Woman’s Determination: Right or Wrong?
    • Is Kindness Intelligent, Selfish, Strong?
    • Independence & Need in Our Lives: How Can They Make Sense?
    • Caring for People—Wisdom or Foolishness?
    • Care for Yourself & Justice to Others—Do They Have to Fight?
    • Justice versus Injustice in Men & Women
    • We Want to Be Happy—But Do We Also Want Not to Be?
    • What Does Getting Ahead Really Mean?
    • The Debate in Every Person: To Have More Feeling or Less?
    • True Self-Expression, and What Interferes
    • What Is a Husband’s Biggest Mistake?
    • Can Men & Women Be Intelligent in Love?
    • Everybody’s Big, Dramatic Question: How Much Should People Mean to Us?
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    • Wowing People and Liking Oneself—What Is the Difference?
    • Does Our Anger Weaken or Strengthen Us?
    • What Makes a Man Truly Strong?
    • What Is Woman’s Greatest Victory—Appearing Beautiful or Seeing Beautifully?
    • Is Kindness Strength?—Aesthetic Realism & Thaddeus Stevens
  • Successful Teaching: Here’s How
    • Through Aesthetic Realism Interest Wins, Cynicism Loses
    • On Gogol’s “The Nose,” a Satire on Snobbishness
    • More on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method
    • Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, Knowledge Opposes Anger—and Students Learn!
    • Lessons on Rhyme, Using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method
    • Poetry as Justice: Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, Aesthetics Defeats Contempt
    • Students Choose Knowing the World, Not Fighting with It
  • Language, Literature & Poetry
    • Man Is Poetically Shown in Southern Road, 1932
    • How Musical Can Sadness Be?—or, Grief, Anger, Hope
    • The World Is in Idioms
    • Art Is Within Science
    • Poetry, Atmosphere, and Neatness
    • Some Poetry Is Distinguished
    • The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
    • A Thrilling Talk on Literature, by Sheldon Kranz
    • Favorite Links about Literature & Teaching English
    • Literature & Life: A Blog
  • Notable Men & Women
    • Spencer Tracy
    • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
    • Independence & Need in Our Lives: How Can They Make Sense?
    • Justice versus Injustice in Men & Women
    • The Debate in Every Person: To Have More Feeling or Less?
    • True Self-Expression, and What Interferes
    • A Woman Whose Name Was Truth
    • Is Kindness Strength?—Aesthetic Realism & Thaddeus Stevens
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Uncategorized

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Successfully Opposes Racism

June 16, 2020 by leilarosen

Poetry as Justice: Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, Aesthetics Defeats Contempt

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Aesthetic Realism, anti-prejudice, Eli SIegel, poetry, social justice, teaching method

More Maxims by Eli Siegel from Damned Welcome

May 21, 2020 by leilarosen

Two weeks ago, I pointed to several Aesthetic Realism maxims by Eli Siegel from his book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. These statements—many of them swift and pithy—are, he wrote, “meant to bother into appreciation.” I find myself thinking of some of these maxims as I try to make sense of what’s happening in our confusing time.

So here are others that encourage me very much.

“If you have time, remember it’s a privilege.”

“The universe, being clever, has given scientists trouble.”

“Let us not be angry at the way we’re angry.”

“It hasn’t yet been scientifically proved that any lovely thing is really over.”

“We are of the world; our job is to be fair to the preposition.”

Filed Under: About Literature, Uncategorized Tagged With: Aesthetic Realism

Aesthetic Realism Maxims by Eli Siegel

May 7, 2020 by leilarosen

As we’re all looking to make sense of a world that has beautiful spring flowers and a terrifying pandemic, we need the way of seeing that’s in the study of Aesthetic Realism. A means to this is the wonderful maxims by Eli Siegel in his book Damned Welcome. In the preface to the book, Mr. Siegel writes:

These maxims are…in behalf of a world too often seen as unkind, dull, and just too bewildering for anything. It is better to be bewildered by an Aesthetic Realism maxim about things than by things themselves….

The present maxims…are on the side of a reasoned gaiety, and a spontaneous, bubbling seriousness. They are meant to bother into appreciation.

Here are some that I love, and feel are relevant to our time. More will follow!

“Our loveliest memories can be helped by our most fundamental hopes.”

“Sighs should be efficient; if not, we should long for their departure.”

“A person is courageous who is comfortable in larger territory than is usual.”

“When we don’t want people to get the hard facts about ourselves, we are not in favor of these three things: the facts, people, ourselves.”

“Only a person who loves people can be alone rightly.”

“Being oneself is a lifetime job, not to be shirked when we sleep.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Aesthetic Realism

A lesson on viruses, based on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

April 10, 2020 by leilarosen

At this critical time, as people all over the world are worried about the power of a virus, I want to share with readers this important article by my friend and colleague Sally Ross. She taught her high school biology students about viruses in a way that we can all learn from, including as to how to see what’s different from ourselves. The lesson is based on the great Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, which was also the basis of my English classes for many years.

Filed Under: About Teaching, Uncategorized

“What Marriage Is Really For”

April 30, 2017 by leirose

I recently read again a poem I feel is sweepingly beautiful: “A Marriage,” by Eli Siegel. In its free verse lines—many of them grand, some of them seemingly simple—it is about that meeting of one self and another, and that meeting of selves and the outside world, that are the essential thing in love. In Ellen Reiss’s commentary to the issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, in which Mr. Siegel’s lecture on this poem begins to be serialized, she explains:

Self and world are the biggest opposites in everyone’s life. And our deepest desire, Aesthetic Realism makes clear, is to like the world through knowing it. We become ourselves in proportion to how much we want to be fair to the world, have it of us. That is the reason for education, why people are impelled to learn. And it is the reason people are impelled to love.

Further: the pain about love, the letdown, the bitterness, why two people who thought they’d love forever now look at each other with fury or dullness, all arise from how the world has been dealt with by the people concerned. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson years ago, as he explained why I came to feel displeased with myself and a man who seemed to love me, Mr. Siegel said: “You used Mr. M to make a world somewhat apart from the world Aesthetic Realism tries to honor.” I find that sentence beautiful, and the explanation true. The very thing recommended by therapists, counselors, buddies, BFFs, and many thoughts of one’s own—to get away from the world with someone—is against what love really is!

Here is the last section of the poem, which is pulsatingly beautiful, which stands for love and marriage, and which shows the great meaning of what Ellen Reiss describes as the hero of the poem: “a word.”

20.
Eyes and mind together,
In thunder a hand lying on a hand.
Wheels whizzing to reach an active page, a learned page—a word.
And a hand lying on a hand,
And a cloud on a cloud,
And a mist over ocean,
And flower going off towards dazzling planets,
And a word meeting a word,
And a word meeting a word,
And a word meeting a word,
And North Carolina, Washington, Baltimore,
And a hand lying on a hand,
And a word.

Read the rest of this issue here.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

“Heard”—a Poem by Ellen Reiss

January 20, 2017 by leirose

Who has not been thrilled hearing the cry of a newborn baby? The new life in it, humanity-in-little, always stirs people, and I’m among them. So I point to this poem on the subject, by Ellen Reiss, which shows the grand meaning in that first sound:

http://beautyofnyc.org/Reiss-Heard.html

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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“Looked for in America”

The current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known describes a tremendous thing people are looking for today in our dear nation. We are looking for, and insisting on, a just, fair way of seeing and being seen. This, as you’ll read, is part of what Eli Siegel called the force of ethics working in the world.

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