MM:
I was listening to some Philip Glass the other day (don't worry, I'm paid to, although I do like his early stuff), which made me think of his operas, which made me think specifically of 'The Making of the Representative for Planet 8'. He turned this into a passable opera (in a noh-play-with-orchestra sort of way) which I saw in London years ago. It was worth seeing just to hear Leslie Garrett trying to inject some gravitas into lines such as 'We cannot eat our sacred fish!'
Anyway, all this served to remind me just how clunky Lessing's 'Canopus in Argos' series seemed at a literary level. Why do mainstream literary writers fumble so much when trying to deal with genre forms? I appreciate that they may not be versed in them on a practical level, but it so often seems as if they lack the mechanism to acquire even a superficial grasp of genre conventions. Is 'The Handmaid's Tale' the (non-Lessing) exception that proves the rule, perhaps? That got the opera treatment, too (from Poul Ruders) as it happens.
I was listening to some Philip Glass the other day (don't worry, I'm paid to, although I do like his early stuff), which made me think of his operas, which made me think specifically of 'The Making of the Representative for Planet 8'. He turned this into a passable opera (in a noh-play-with-orchestra sort of way) which I saw in London years ago. It was worth seeing just to hear Leslie Garrett trying to inject some gravitas into lines such as 'We cannot eat our sacred fish!'
Anyway, all this served to remind me just how clunky Lessing's 'Canopus in Argos' series seemed at a literary level. Why do mainstream literary writers fumble so much when trying to deal with genre forms? I appreciate that they may not be versed in them on a practical level, but it so often seems as if they lack the mechanism to acquire even a superficial grasp of genre conventions. Is 'The Handmaid's Tale' the (non-Lessing) exception that proves the rule, perhaps? That got the opera treatment, too (from Poul Ruders) as it happens.
Comment