Last Call, the fat man, Lady Luck, and Dyaco

So, for complex psychological reasons, I've taken a break from the Daymon Smith book I was working on to read Last Call by Tim Powers. Here's the synchronistic "logic" behind that decision.

On the morning of June 3, I received an email which (among a great many other things) linked to my 2023 post "Will Power is the flame of the Green Lantern!" and pointed out the potential pun on Will as a name, and also brought up the mysterious figure of Tim who appeared later that year ("Well, that didn't take long"). Putting Will Power as a name together with Tim, my mind immediately went to the novelist Tim Powers, who is probably the most famous person ever to have sent me an unsolicited email. (He wrote in 2020 to confirm my speculation that many major features of his novel On Stranger Tides were put in place for the purpose of allowing one of the characters to say, "Oh, my God, sir, he says he's going to defecate here!") Just after having that thought, I went downstairs and found that my wife was playing the Post Malone song "Losers," which begins with the line, "Last callers, last chancers." With Tim Powers as context, that made me think of his novel Last Call, which I have never read but which I know has to do with Tarot cards. As a final connection cinching the whole thing, I remembered that the mysterious stranger who visited Whitley Strieber in 1998 (and who I believe is Tim) had a hand in Whit's own book about Tarot cards, The Path.

So that same day I got an epub of Last Call and started reading it, rather slowly, due to a shortage of free time. This morning I read a reference to "the fat man in the complex plane" and guessed it must be a reference to the shape of the black hole at the center of the Mandelbrot set, though I'd never heard it called that. If I’d just read on, I would have found my guess confirmed a few pages later, but first I googled fat man mandelbrot set just to see what would come up, and the first hit was an article (most of which is behind a paywall) called "Mandelbrot's 'Fat Man': Mathematics, Space, and Randomness" by Marc Barham. The first section heading is "'Last Call' by Tim Powers (1992) and 'Dune,'" so I'm guessing the "fat man" label comes from Powers, not from Mandelbrot himself. What really got my attention, though, was the epigraph with which the article begins:

“Luck, be a lady tonight.

Luck, be a lady tonight.

Luck, if you’ve ever been a lady to begin with.

Luck, be a lady tonight.”

— Frank Sinatra, ‘Luck Be A Lady’,

That song, the reader will recall, came up in a comment on "I've been A minor for a heart of gold," which later served as a stimulus for the post "Lady in Green."

I read the "fat man" reference and the Sinatra epigram while waiting to see a doctor. As soon as I'd left the clinic, a man walked past me on the street wearing a blue-green T-shirt that said "Dyaco Taichung Marathon 2018." I had posted about a similar T-shirt in my 2024 post "Whales and narrow roads," which Bill recently brought up in the comments.

The same email that moved me to start reading Last Call also included a discussion of two different Daymon Smith characters called Dyacom and Dyacomb.