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This view of opera as overwhelmingly sensuous enhances Koestenbaum's later exploration of opera's artistic ambiguity, the equilibrium between opera's dramatic and musical appeal. One chapter, entitled "The Unspeakable Marriage of Words and Music," describes not an egalitarian relationship, as Wagner dreamed of, but a constant exchange of submissions. When interviewed, Koestenbaum readily admits his lack of experience with European languages, which limits his perception of the true balance between text and music intended by the composer; however, he still manages to capture something of the incomparable and rich sensation that the sung word brings about...
Koestenbaum devotes his first chapter to a character analysis of the typical "opera queen." This label (which he readily applies to himself) has a long history and carries with it a complex array of preconceptions. Not only is it associate with the world of gay camp, inhabited by Judy Garland and Bette Davis enthusiasts, but even within the gay community Koestenbaum implies that it succinctly captures the essence of a particular personality (so succinctly that you may see the words "no opera queens, please!" in gay personal...
Koestenbaum's chapter on "The Shut-in Fan" is poignant testimony to opera's appeal to the pent up and repressed, as well as to the changes that the advent of sound recording brought to the art. With the commencement of Texaco's Saturday broadcasts from the Met and the massive sales of opera recordings, opera was brought into the home, to the joy of the reclusive and antisocial...
...often and up close: physicians and nurses. Nuland is a surgeon who also teaches the history of medicine at Yale. He has the rare ability -- like John McPhee exploring a geological fault -- to explain the abstruse in language that can be both meticulously exact and wondrously evocative. In a chapter on cancer, for instance, his description of how the cells operate contains this startling analogy: "In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society...
There should be a good sexual joke here -- the tireless besieger besieged, sacked and pillaged -- but the author won't let matters play that way. He ) allows no distance at all from constant sexual striving, less pornography than pathology. Every page of every chapter is nose to skin, eyeball to sweaty flesh, told by Ira in long, gush-of-consciousness sentences that ooze on for several hundred words. Now and then the type switches to italic as the tormented Fiona, somewhat less convincingly, rants her anguish...