Cover
Me: Writers Covering Rock Songs, Musicians Covering Literature
Session Coordinator:
Dr. Paul Gleason
Dept. of English, Cardinal Stritch University
6801 North Yates Road, Milwaukee,
Wisconsin 53217
pwgleason@stritch.edu
“The Smiths and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’: Suicide, Surveillance, Signs, Space and a
S‘mother’ed Subject”
The Smiths is an ordinary name for an extraordinary indie
rock band from Manchester, England that performed from 1982 to
1987 and defined the signature sound of postmodern irony. I will discuss the
group’s unique contributions to pop culture while examining their single,
“Shakespeare’s Sister,” its intertextuality and literary allusions to Virginia
Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Elizabeth Smart’s “By Grand Central
Station I Sat Down and Wept,” and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.
Next, I will show how the lyrics are working in code, playing roulette with
death in vocal and instrumental sparring, and popularizing contemporary theory
musically: From Freud’s unheimlich, nirvana, death wish, Oedipus
complex, and psychopathology to Bentham’s and Foucault’s panopticons; from
Nietzsche’s nihilism to Derrida’s deconstruction and difference. Immediately
following, I will annex not only the “personal as political” and Woolf’s
“androgyny,” but also Morrissey’s love for the “Northern Woman,” which is also
his hate for his own dopplegänger, Margaret Thatcher. Finally, I will demonstrate how Morrissey, by
out “panopticonning” his culture’s panopticon, erases himself as subject and
becomes “the prophet of the fourth sex.”
Julie L. Smith-Hubbard
Cardinal
Stritch University
jlsmith-hubbard@stritch.edu
“Plumbing the Depths of ‘Greasy Lake’:
T. C. Boyle and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Spirits in the Night’”
In his review of Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings from Ashbury
Park, N. J. (1973),
rock critic Lester Bangs lauds the album’s “cosmically surfeiting” lyrics. He describes Springsteen as an artist whose
language, in spite of its serious social intent, displays “the joy of … showoff
talent run amuck.” The album succeeds
precisely because of its brilliant verbal excess, Bangs concludes, and with
this debut Springsteen asserts himself as “a bold new talent with more than a
mouthful to say.” It comes as no
surprise, then, that “Spirits in the Night” (1973), the now famous track from
Springsteen’s first album, provides
the inspiration for an ambitious work by another language-driven, socially
conscious artist, the novelist and short story writer T. C. Boyle. With “Greasy Lake”
(1985), the title story of his second collection of short fiction, Boyle admittedly
offers “a kind of riff on the song,
a free take on its glorious spirit.”
Boyle’s take, however, departs from the elegiac tone of Springsteen’s
original, presenting instead a satirical romp that tours the dark side of “Spirits in the Night.” But Boyle’s own surfeit of
language ultimately subverts his intentions.
Embellishing his prose to the point of satiety, Boyle dulls the edge of satire,
leaving his readers with a “cover” of “Spirits” that in its extravagance
delivers both tribute and critique,
exalting that which it hopes to expose, and finally presenting a baffling
hybrid—a work of postmodern irony brimming with nostalgia.
David Riordan
Cardinal
Stritch University
dlriordan@stritch.edu
“Looking for Home in the Most Unlikely Places: The Song
‘Breakfast on Pluto’ and Its Role in the Novel Breakfast on Pluto
by Patrick McCabe”
Patrick Braden, the protagonist of Patrick McCabe’s novel Breakfast
on Pluto, uses the lyrics of the obscure song “Breakfast on Pluto,” which
suggest a utopia of happiness and peace, as a coping mechanism to help him deal
with the trauma that he has experienced in his life. As a transsexual
prostitute abandoned by his mother and ignored by his father, Patrick
continually tries to establish a sense of home/belonging for himself. Patrick
refuses to place himself within the confines of any determined role, whether
that be political, sexual, or even emotional, and his ability to assimilate all
facets of outwardly recognizable fixities of identity aside from nationality
allows him the ability to experience situations of violence and trauma that may
be cut off to persons with one particular affiliation, whether that be gender,
ethnicity, or religion. While many of Patrick’s life-experiences are
devastatingly traumatic, potentially suggesting a negative “moral” to this
text, the actual character of Patrick negates that view. Indeed, his ambiguity
and hilariously cheerful personality enables the reader to view the final entry
of the novel as a harbinger of hope, wherein Patrick describes his fervent wish
for a future, which includes the promise of new beginnings. In the end, Patrick
continues to yearn for his mother and a defined sense of home but instills in
the reader a sense of hope that one day he will heal himself by becoming his
own mother and creating his own definition of home.
Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier
Marian Coll.
vamurrenuspilmaier@stritch.edu
“Daydreams and Recognitions of the Sprawl: William Gibson
and Sonic Youth”
At the height of Ronald Reagan’s America, William Gibson’s “Sprawl
Trilogy”—Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)—inaugurated
cyberpunk, a genre that Frederic Jameson has described as “an exceptional
literary realization” of “transnational corporate realities” and “global
paranoia.” The Sprawl, a key setting in Gibson’s trilogy, is a dystopian vision
of a future America
dominated by computers, bioengineering, and the currency of information in
which cities grow into other cities and no center is recognizable. Gibson’s
presentation of the Sprawl is crucial to his critique of the political,
military, and corporate hegemonic policies of the Reagan Administration. “The
Sprawl,” Sonic Youth’s cover version of the “Sprawl Trilogy” from the Daydream Nation album (1988), lyrically explores
the feminist implications of Gibson’s critique while musically rejecting the
dictates of the corporate popular music establishment of the 1980s. Sonic Youth
update their engagement with Gibson in “Pattern Recognition,” a song from the Sonic Nurse album (2004) that covers Gibson’s
most recent novel, Pattern Recognition
(2003). The story of the mystical “cool hunter” Cayce Pollard, Pattern Recognition considers the
violent impact of popular culture, techno-capitalism, and multinational corporations
on a post-9/11 world. Sonic Youth write their cover version of the novel from
Cayce’s perspective, giving voice and power to women attempting to retain their
individuality in George W. Bush’s America.
Paul Gleason
Cardinal
Stritch University
pwgleason@stritch.edu