Stacy Horn

I’m reading Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. It’s not her best, but if you love Willa Cather you will most certainly enjoy this. If you are a singer you will enjoy it a little more. It’s about a young girl from a small town in Colorado who is apparently going to become a big singing star. (I’m halfway through.)

It’s not about group singing, it’s about soloists, but there’s a brief mention of choral societies, which are my thing: “Those were the days when lumbermen’s daughters and brewers’ wives contended in song; studied in Germany and then floated from Sangerfest to Sangersfest. Choral societies flourished in all the rich lake cities and river cities.”

I enjoy reading about any experience of singing though, when the writer gets it. Cather seems to get it. She also wrote a short story about an opera singer. Was she a singer? Ah, I just read that she based the character from Song of the Lark on an opera singer she was friends with. She definitely felt a connection to singing in some way.

The best descriptions of singing I’ve ever read are in James Cain’s book Mildred Pierce, which is one of my favorite books, and not because of the singing. It’s a great book period. It’s not noir like his others. I just read it incorrectly described as “hardboiled” on Wikipedia and I’m telling you it isn’t hardboiled in any way, shape or form. I would beg everyone to give this book a try. It’s pretty perfect. It captures all the struggles of life, small and large, but Cain’s genius is in communicating enormous poignancy in the absolute smallest, most mundane moments. He also writes women very well in this book.

But Cain was very much into singing (you can tell). He was the son of an opera singer, one of his wives was an opera singer, and I just read that he wanted to be a singer but he was told he was not good enough. Hmm. I wonder if there’s a recording of him singing anywhere? PS: Even if you don’t like opera you will still love the descriptions of it in this book.

A solitary flower in a city garden, taken a couple of weeks ago. The soloist hanging in there when the season is over.

I recently visited the archives of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and I just wanted to make some of their records more widely known. They have burial (and baptismal) records for people who were living and dying on Blackwell’s Island (and other places, but I was only looking into Blackwell’s Island).

As researchers already know, if you are trying to find information about the wealthy of NYC there’s a lot of information out there. But it can be very difficult sometimes to find the unfortunates who fell between the cracks.

I believe the Metropolitan Hospital was the new name for the Lunatic Asylum. If people were buried on Hart Island, New York’s Potter’s Field, that was noted as well. I thought this was important to make known because there are some gaps in the records for who was buried on Hart Island.

So if you are looking for someone who was destitute and you think might have ended up on Blackwell’s this is one place you might look.

Please share this easy to understand (and funny) explanation of the importance of net neutrality. This shouldn’t be a democrat vs republican issue.

And may I present: Fall in New York City.

Time Warner went down in my neighborhood, the West Village, yesterday afternoon. Not just the internet, but all their services, internet, tv, phone, everything. Their wifi is up this morning, which is how I’m here, but everything else is still down. I only just recently learned they even offered wifi, and it wasn’t up last night, but it is now, thank god. I felt so cut off! I don’t know how wide-spread the outage is.

So I started watching the current season of Homeland. I don’t think I can continue with it, though. Nothing good is going to happen to that poor young Pakistani man, and I can’t bear watching unhappy things anymore. I need shows like Bunheads, and only shows like Bunheads. And of course Bunheads got cancelled.

Scrawled on the wall somewhere between my apartment and my dentist at NYU.

I just entered the Open Call contest sponsored by The Space. I only heard about it recently, and so I didn’t have time to make a video or other things to jazz up my presentation, but it was fun to enter in any case.

I’ve been taking a class in transmedia (storytelling over multiple platforms, ie, a story could begin in a book but continue in twitter, or a game, or on Facebook, etc.). The teacher, the playwright J. Dakota Powell, suggested I enter a project I submitted for the class. So I did! The finalists will be announced next month, so we don’t have long to wait.

I’ve been basing my projects on the book I hope to write (more news about that in a few weeks, hopefully). If I get to write the book, I will implement these projects when the book comes out.

Actually, I want to also come up with a singing idea, something that might complement Imperfect Harmony and might also spur some holiday sales, so I have to come up with something fast and relatively simple to launch!

A doggie daycare in Tribeca. I would think working here would be heaven, but maybe the reality is a little different? I don’t know anyone who has ever worked in one of these places.