On the reanimation of insane kings

I'm trying this mobile blogging thing largely out of a desire to keep posting with some regularity. Please forgive my clumsy thumbs their typos.

I just started reading The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, on which more later, perhaps after I figure out what exactly I can make of it. For now, I have two observations from having read the fairly straightforward Introduction (I always read the Introduction, unless I fear it might give away the plot. Since this book has no plot, I figured I was safe. Does anybody else do this? Show of hands?).

So.

1. I am once more saddened by the fact that I don't have a middle name. In this case, because my eventual biographer will be unable to follow the first paragraph of the work in question (the summing up paragraph, the broadly drawn arc of triumph, or of tragedy) with a prosaic sentence along the lines of "Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon on June 13, 1888." Somehow, that seems to me the most tiresome convention in all of literature. I should mention, Jessica Sarbo gave me an unofficial middle name in 6th grade, when I complained about it back then. "Churchill." Perhaps she was overly taken by alliteration. She was very pretty, so I went along with it, but I don't feel particularly beholden to it now.

2. Biographers, particularly academics, always find the wrong things interesting. Hence the following sentence, sliding through the text and off the page and never to be heard from again: "This conservatism, together with his mystical monarchism, his espousal of Sebastianism - the belief that the mad sixteenth-century king, Sebastian, would someday return to lead Portugal into glory - rendered him politically suspicious." Just politically, huh. Not any other kind of suspicious. Clearly.

Bolaño.

I'd been reading a lot about Roberto Bolaño of late, in the Believer and perhaps in The New York Review of Books and I suppose elsewhere as well, the Believer article written by Rodrigo Fresán and including not a few accounts of conversations with Bolaño, before and during his illness that killed him, where he resembles the obsessive endearingly out-of-synch high school friend whose family was just slightly off and who you started out by pitying until you realized that he was infinitely smarter than you; whether from fear or from jealousy, I dropped all such friends when I claimed to be growing up.