Pop History Moment: "A Christmas Carol" Was Published

On this day in 1843 A Christmas Carol - that timeless tale of redemption, which brought to life one Ebenezer Scrooge - was first published by Chapman & Hall of London. Illustrated by John Leech, who created such images as Scrooge meeting the Ghost of Christmas Present (shown, below), the novella was an immediate success both financially and critically; after the disappointing reception and sales of Charles Dickens' previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, the popularity of A Christmas Carol must have been as gratifying to the author as its impact would have been to the juvenile Dickens, upon whose experiences it was based...




Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot -- say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance -- literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

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"Too Shy" by Kajagoogoo

Before I was a blogger I was a pretty apathetic sort... Take this song as a for instance: I've been listening to it for more than 25 years now, and it wasn't until several minutes prior to writing this that I even gave a rat's ass who wrote it, who sang it, or what circumstances surrounded its creation. Say what you will about blogging, but it definitely has its plus side, especially when faced with a blank screen and a compulsion to write about pop culture.

Too Shy was recorded and released by Kajagoogoo in 1983 - in my humble opinion one of the greatest years in the history of British pop music; it was produced by Nick Rhodes (of Duran Duran fame) and that band's in-house producer Colin Thurston, responsible for Duran Duran's early sound (as in their first single Planet Earth). The song appeared on the Kajagoogo's debut album, White Feathers; it's being sung by Limahl, who was born on this day in 1958.
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Happy Birthday Michelangelo Signorile

I first read the work of Michelangelo Signorile way back in the day - back when gay press outlets like The Advocate were still relevant to the lives of most gay men outside of Chelsea and West Hollywood, which should give you some idea how long ago that was*. Of course, back then the gay community still existed largely in the shadows, and the cultural workers who toiled there did so in what looked like it would always be a niche market. Few could have foreseen how mainstream both the gay community and one of its mouthiest members would become, let alone how quickly...

The oppressive backlash gay men encountered due to AIDS then - like the ongoing demonization by evangelical Christians over our uppity insistence on equal rights today - has brought about unprecedented recognition and even political leverage to the gay community, for which we** owe bigots as far back as Anita Bryant and as current as Rick Warren our eternal gratitude. The same phenomenon also catapulted Signorile from his cozy corner as a scribbler on queer social issues to one of the foremost opinion-makers of our times, and all because of an encounter he had in 1988 with a particularly vile bigot named Joseph Ratzinger.

Currently host of The Michelangelo Signorile Show, on Sirius Satellite Radio's OutQ channel, he's also the author of four books, all of which arose from his work as a columnist for both The Advocate and Out Magazine. From the hot-button issue of outing, which was the first to give him national exposure as a major contributor to OutWeek, to the struggles experienced by gays in the military and even the casual homophobia we as gay men encounter daily, Signorile can be counted on to have his own take on any issue, and a deliciously liberal one as well. No doubt as he gets older, which he does by one year today, he'll have something to say about that and much more besides.

*Like, the early Nineties...
**And by 'we' I mean groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation (which Signorile co-founded) as well.
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Gratuitous Brunette: Jake Gyllenhaal

Born on this day in 1980 - obviously a very good year - Jake Gyllenhaal was not only the Pop Culture Institute's Hottie of the Year for last year, but also next year, the year after that, and any old year he wants really...
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Bonus Video: "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush

Wuthering Heights appeared on Kate Bush's debut album, 1978's The Kick Inside, and was also her first single; it spent four weeks at Number 1 in the UK, a first for a female singer-songwriter.

This is just one of the videos that were made to accompany the song; because I felt this one was a) wackier, and 2) more colourful - plus seasonal, what with all that red - I chose it over the other one. Just in case you were wondering.

And of course, it's all in honour of Emily Brontë - author of the novel Wuthering Heights - who died on this day in 1848.
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Pop History Moment: Death Stalks Haworth Parsonage

When I first read about the Brontë brood - Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, Anne - I remember thinking how cool it must have been to grow up in a house full of writers... Then I met other writers. The real irony is that the parsonage in such a devout parish could be so thoroughly infested with these demons, with all their demons...

Death visited Haworth Parsonage often, and came for Emily on this day in 1848. Always frail - which the weather in Yorkshire did precisely nothing to ameliorate - she caught a chill while attending the funeral of her brother Branwell in September and three months later she was dead herself, of tuberculosis.

Emily Brontë wrote only one novel; that it should be Wuthering Heights more than excuses the paucity of her oeuvre. Reading it practically killed me, so I'm compelled to admire the fortitude of anyone who could write it - especially in longhand, several times over, by lantern light in a draughty house.

The following year Anne Brontë died, after which there was a six-year gap before the loss of Charlotte; of the six children sired by Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell following their marriage in December 1812, all of them (and his wife besides) died before the parson did, in June 1861.
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Remembering... Jean Genet

It was not too long ago - within the past 50 years - that the homosexual male was an outlaw, a rebel standing against all that was bourgeois and therefore contemptible about life. Well, Jean Genet could make the best of them look like powdered poodles; in fact, he even made the outlaws look like sell-outs...

Born on this day in 1910, he spent his first year of life in the brothel where his mother worked; given up for adoption he spent an idyllic childhood in the countryside. His idyll was shattered when, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to Mettray Penal Colony; initially intended to be lenient (not unlike the borstal system in England, with a focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment) by the time Genet was there - as chronicled in his novel The Miracle of the Rose (1946) - it was a pretty brutal place.

Upon his release he joined the French Foreign Legion, but was soon drummed out for committing a homosexual act - which to me pretty much seems the whole point of joining the French Foreign Legion in the first place, but the authorities obviously felt otherwise. Genet spent the postwar years whoring around Europe, as recounted in his book The Thief's Journal (1949); in the same year he wrote his most famous play, The Maids.

By 1950 Genet's work had, for some reason, been banned in America, which naturally made him a huge star in France; lauded by the likes of Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida this should have been the most productive time of his life, and would have been had he not been depressed. When a relationship in the mid-1960s with a tightrope walker named Abdullah ended in suicide, Genet almost made it a double.

Instead, Genet became even more political (if such a thing is possible) than he was before, frequently appearing at rallies in support of that perennial French bugbear, immigrants. In 1970, at the behest of the Black Panthers, he spent three months in the United States, lecturing and writing; in 1982 he was in Beirut at the time of the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps, and visited shortly thereafter, later writing an essay called Quatre heures à Chatila (Four Hours in Shatila) about the experience.

Jean Genet died in Paris in April 1986, ostensibly of cancer, but a fall and subsequent blow to the head may have hastened his demise; he is buried in Morocco, in the Spanish Cemetery at Larache.
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"Milord" par Edith Piaf

From an appearance in 1959 on The Ed Sullivan Show, it's a song about a prostitute admiring a dapper gentleman walking past her; good thing most people in the Sullivan audience didn't speak French...

Milord, also called Ombre de la Rue (A shadow of the streets) was written in 1959 by Georges Moustaki (with music by Marguerite Monnot); according to Wikipedia (and, you know, they're always right) it has also been sung by Cher, meaning I won't rest until I possess that version as well.
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In Memoriam: Edith Piaf

I think of her whenever I see a little sparrow hopping across the concrete in search of a few crumbs... Instead of food, though, the crumbs Edith Piaf (born on this day in 1915) sought were love. Her adopted surname, of course, meant 'sparrow'; certainly those qualities of frailty and doggedness must have been there when Louis Leplée - the nightclub owner - first laid eyes on her, singing in the street for coins, in 1935.

Leplee's murder the following year would be the first down in a career of ups and downs for Edith Piaf, as she was questioned by police in relation to the case; the mobsters who killed him were known to her and her involvement, however cursory, did not sit well with her new fans. She survived the scandal, as she would always do; in 1940 her new friend Jean Cocteau wrote her a role in his play Le Bel Indifférent. It was a success, and once more she was on her way.

Despite crippling stage fright, Piaf performed extensively throughout the war, but the song most often associated with the era (and her) - La vie en rose - would not enter her repertoire until 1946. Amazingly, she managed to escape the Nazi occupation with her reputation intact; so many, in the interest of self-preservation, either collaborated or gave the appearance of collaboration, and Piaf was no different. She would later claim to have aided the Resistance, but as they kept very inadequate records, the truth of that may never be known.

A post-war tour of the United States, undertaken with the then-unknown Charles Aznavour, saw both of them acclaimed across North America; naturally, she was on top of the world when, in October 1949, her lover Marcel Cerdan was killed in a plane crash. In 1951 she and Aznavour were in a car accident; although they survived, Piaf came away from it addicted to morphine, which was not helped by two subsequent crashes. In 1952 she married Jacques Pills, whose main job seems to be taking her to rehab; they divorced in 1956. She took a second husband, Théo Sarapo, in 1962, who performed with her towards the end.

Edith Piaf died of cancer in October 1963, the same day as her old friend Jean Cocteau; she was 47. In 2007 it was as if she'd come back to life when Marion Cotillard portrayed the singer in the hugely entertaining biopic, La Vie En Rose, for which its star was awarded a Best Actress Academy Award.
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