Ozymandias's ISBN number

[Max...how did you know that Asian American literature has been on my mind, too? Sometimes our parallel thought streams give me the genuine willies.]

[For too many months, my library has been in the most shameful diasarray. I used to insist that my own whacked Dewey decimal system be used to organize the books. Finally, a weekend or two ago, with time and extra energy to burn, I organized the mess, and accumulated two Trader Joe's grocery bags full of books to donate. (Still they sit in my foyerette...give them to prisoners? Goodwill? S.F. Library?)]

[I finally decided to let go most of the books Max and I read (or were assigned to read) for the lit class he describes in above-linked entry. I even put Ms. Kim's reader, which I'd kept for twelve years, on the recycling pile. One book I retained was this collection of linked short stories by a gay Chinese-American man (about a decade older than us?) who grew up in Honolulu. Being temporarily over Virginia Woolf, I reread it for the first time since the class. Still good, if perhaps a bit of its time. I'm going to keep it, and the Bharati Mukherjee collection, for old times' sake.]

[As far as Max's point about leaving a legacy, this has been humming in the back of my mind lately, too. From East-meets-West modernity to the dead white male canon, then, we go:]

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822

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