An original comic opera, in two acts entitled Ptarmigan, or, A Canadian carnival Book

Insightful, incisive... and ultimately more than a bit of exhausting. I'm drawn to the structure and style, which is primarily made up of reflective fragments that are arranged in associative clusters of memories and content, but the text's greatest quality'the deep immersion into the author's psyche and his personal obsessions and desires'is also, ultimately, its greatest drawback (after a while one pines for some critical distance).

But as someone like myself who is interested in opera in a cursory manner, it's a nice crash-course on its history and many of its major figures and works, presented in a manner that is accessible through Koestenbaum's almost excessively personal and often very witty approach to the subject. And of course, as the title indicates, this is all intricately intertwined with discourses of queer sexuality in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it leads to some really beautiful connections and observations.

"When I as a gay person go backward to find or write the story of my sexuality, I am making it up, because sexuality has no absolute origin or motivation, though because sexuality is structured like a narrative, with crux, climax, and denouement, we are always hoping to unknot its beginning. Playing a record, I move backward in time to the imagined scene of recording... playing a record is like playing the Ouija, speaking to the dead, asking questions of an immensity that only throws back the echo of one's futile question, a repeated 'myself, myself...'"