Stacy Horn

I've written six non-fiction books, the most recent is Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York.

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2 thoughts on “Maybe I will Nap the Entire Day

  1. I’ve been zipping through “Imperfect Harmony” in spurts. It is so good and I am learning so much! Last night, the movie “Sister Act” was on and I watched the part where Whoopie takes over the choir for the first time, arranging the basses, altos and sopranos. I have a cousin whose husband ran the “Art Christmas Aggregation” which was quite a famous choir out of Sarnia, and “Sister Act” was one of her favourite movies.

    I paused at page 172 to comment. You are writing about how our brains work on music and how we just ‘do’ and aren’t very articulate about it, especially while we are ‘doing’. I run into this all the time in philosophy and morality and it is largely ignored or glossed over. The parts of our brains that are able to articulate what we are feeling are not the parts that give us the feeling in the first place. In morality, we ‘feel’ what is right or wrong (we make a value judgment) and then we try to articulate it. However, the explanations that persist through the years are of course, the ones written down, or articulated! So we begin to think that morality is rational because that’s all the explanation we ever get for it – rationality. It’s very interesting. I thought you might enjoy the parallels.

  2. I have a cat on me at the moment and I can’t check that particular page, but that is very interesting that it’s different parts of the brain. So we’re basically trying to do the impossible when we try to describe it!

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