The Little Dog Lay Curled and Did Not Rise

• Alex Chilton was born 66 years ago today. Big Star. It seems Big Star has now achieved Beatles status with me - I can hear any song I want any time in my head, I don't want it in my head and I don't want it in my ears. Chilton's birthday will continue to be noted here.
• The Celebrity Left Is Still the Enemy: Accommodating fake radicals like the DSA-shilling Chapo gang/Jacobin crew who police the margins and impose their shitty politics/forms of interaction on people seeking out an alternative is to concede everything. These people sold Bernie fucking Sanders as the vanguard of the socialist movement in this country. Resisting their claim to radical spaces is not infighting, it’s the assertion of a real radical alternative that is needed now more than ever. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Accepting the sincerity, authority and leadership of these parasites is suicide.  
• Frances has new article on Indigenous American historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
• Why people vote for counterproductive policies. 
• Crispy's 2016.
• Duck Dynasty versus Modern Family. Maps of what who watches what in America.
• Ed interviews Dan: Literary criticism is still occurring on blogs, it’s just that blogs are now not the only online venue available to critics who want to discuss literature in ways still not possible in most newspapers and print magazines. I continue to read lots of blogs, but they are now updated much less regularly. Much of the function many blogs assumed—brief comments and links, etc.—now is fulfilled by Facebook and Twitter. I don’t have a problem with that, since that leaves blogs to do more longform commentary. I still use my blog for longer essays and reviews that don’t really fit anywhere else. Only on The Reading Experience. It has a reduced audience from the initial wave of literary blogging, but that’s ok. Other bloggers, such as yourself, continue more or less to use the miscellany format, which is cool, too. People come to your blog to look around. There’s a lot of stuff there.
• Ruefle.
• End of year People Who Died lists being drawn, people have already forgot Alan Vega.

YEAR'S END

Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.