Bleeding from all 5 Senses

Most readers have never heard of Jose Alfredo Zendejas Pineda (1953-1998). A few might know him by his pseudonym, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. But many readers know (and even love) the quasi-mythical character he inspired, Ulises Lima, from Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives: a ticking time bomb who wrote incessantly in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing, but who never wrote poems. The real Santiago did, in fact, fill every page he could find with his words. And he may indeed have been a ticking time bomb. But-for the record-he did write poems.