Wayne Koestenbaum Quotes

I mention Jackie mostly because I want to be assured that I inhabit the same universe as other people; that I am not alone on a distant shore. Jackie glues me to this world - most effectively when I can find a way to mention her name or her attributes, when I can find a pretext, however frail, to introduce her into a conversation, even at the risk of non sequitur, bathos, or incoherence.

Listeners love when opera dethrones or kills language; the regicide, on these occasions, is the revolutionary, pleasure-seeking, penetrated, tickled ear. Opera theory tells us that words master music, but we, in our secret hearts, know music's superiority; and this destruction of language, this reversal of hierarchy, makes opera a fit object for the enthusiasms of sex-and-gender dissidents.

She would tell me parts of her story, but they never added up, and, intoxicated, I probed no further. I was grateful that Moira Orfei was endless, and that she never told me the true story of her difficult life.

The beauty and magnitude of a diva's voice resides, so the iconography suggests, in her deformity. Her voice is beautiful because she herself is not-and her ugliness is interpreted as a sign of moral and social deviance. Reading biographies of divas, I can't ignore the repeated references to physical flaws-for example, Benedetta Pisaroni's "features horribly disfigured by small-pox," prompting spectators to shut their eyes "so as to hear without being condemned to see." Audiences speculated that Maria Malibran was not anatomically a woman, but an androgyne or hermaphrodite-an aberrant physique to match her voice's magic power.

Later I will systemize my impossible subject, but for the moment I want to enjoy a tentative movement between its different chambers. I am not certain which are important and which are extraneous. Nor am I certain whether this topic is one that I have the strength to pursue.

The world was doing its best to ignore the fact that I was a writer.

... and I'll hypothesize that, in general, identity germinates from humiliation's soil... Why am I confident that this is true? Do I know what 'identity' is? A molten enterprise, it consists, I suppose, in that bewildering and half-inaudible chorus of inner fantasies and memories that builds the illusory sense of ego... Humiliation isn't merely the basement of a personality, or the scum pile on the stairway down. Humiliation is the earlier event that paves the way for 'self' to know it exists.

How frequently do you look in the mirror? Does your face please you? Are you disgusted to detect familial features? Do you worship or hate your ancestors? Do you consider your image erotic? Do you pretend that you are a star's child? If you squint, does your reflection become abstract? Is abstraction a transcendental escape from identity or a psychotic spasm of depersonalization?