literary references

[Julian.West@mac.dartmouth.edu]

 Howard A. Landman writes (and I apologize for the long quotation):

>                       THE SENSUAL WORLD
>He said I was a flower of the mountain, yes.
>When I could wear a sunset, mmh, yes.
>And then he whispered would I, mmh, yes.
>And at first with the charm around him, mmh, yes.
>He loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts
>Mmh, yes.
>  Anyone familiar with Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's "Ulysses"
>  will immediately recognize where Kate plagiarized the above lyrics.  If
>  you don't have Ulysses handy, you can hear "Ralph Spoilsport" performing
>  the soliloquy at the end of the Firesign Theater's "How Can You Be In Two
>  Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?".

>  Question (I haven't seen the new album): Does Kate give Joyce credit?

  Please tell me you are kidding! Any form of literary
  allusion is now to be branded "plagiarism"? Kate is
  a multiple sinner! Don't you realize that she blatantly
  _stole_ the name "Heathcliff" from Bronte's _Wuthering_
  _Heights_? I just checked my copy of _The_Kick_Inside_
  and found that she didn't give the due credit
  "title courtesy one of the Bronte siblings, I
  forget which", and that she wasn't sued for this by
  the Haworth parish vicar probably lulled her into
  the delusion that she could go about referring to
  other people's published works willy nilly.

  In fact, the history of this song is that Kate wrote
  a musical setting for an extract from Molly's soliloquy.
  We have identified precisely the original text
  (for which I here credit Jorn Barger). Presumably,
  this would have been published with a note
  "lyrics James Joyce/musical setting Kate Bush".
  The Joyce estate _refused_permission_ for Kate to 
  publish this, so she rewrote the lyrics (in a rather
  Joycean fashion, actually) so as merely to allude to
  the original.

  By the way, if you had actually looked in a copy of
  _Ulysses_ yourself, you would find that the lines
  you quoted above "When I could wear a (the) sunset"
  "And at first with the charm around him" and
  "He loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts"
  were _not_ written by Joyce! You missed some more
  obvious words, such as "seedcake", which were.

---------------------------------------------- julian ---