Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate, Nine is a Vine…

"And the serpent's eyes shine…."

For William Norton:

Part 1— Everybody Comes to Rick's.

Part 2— Here Comes Everybody.

… and Finishing Up at Noon

This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times.

Above: Frank Langella in "Starting Out in the Evening" Right: Johnny Depp in "The Ninth Gate"

"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage."

– "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984

My own adventures in that realm— as reader, not author— may illustrate Llosa's remark. 

A nearby stack of paperbacks I haven't touched for some months (in order from bottom to top)—

1. Pale Rider by Alan Dean Foster
2. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
3. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
4. Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint Exup�ry
5. Literary Reflections by James A. Michener
6. The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty
7. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
8. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
9. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
10. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
11. Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
12. What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson
13. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
14. A Gathering of Spies by John Altman
15. Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers
16. Hook— Tinkerbell's Challenge by Tristar Pictures
17. Rising Sun by Michael Crichton
18. Changewar by Fritz Leiber
19. The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe
20. The Hustler by Walter Tevis
21. The Natural by Bernard Malamud
22. Truly Tasteless Jokes by Blanche Knott
23. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
24. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

What moral Vargas Llosa might draw from the above stack I do not know.

Generally, I prefer the sorts of books in a different nearby stack. See Sisteen, from May 25. That post the fanciful reader may view as related to number 16 in the above list. The reader may also relate numbers 24 and 22 above (an odd couple) to By Chance, from Thursday, July 22.

* The Web version's title has a misprint— "living" instead of "lying."

An ancient symbol of Venus, the Evening Star—

For some background, see Anti-Christmas (June 25), 2008 and The Devil and Wallace Stevens.

A purely mathematical version of the same figure—

Notes on Mathematics and Narrative, continued

"the Citizen Kane of horror films"
– Sarah Lawless quoting other reviews
in Saga of the Wicker Man,
cited here on September 7

"Frivolous as a willow on a tombstone"
– Robert Stone on "our secret culture" in A Flag for Sunrise

"world's wildfire, leave but ash"
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.,
quoted here on October 4

Happy birthday, Britt.

The Praised and the Damned

Albeck died on September 29, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels.

From the American Mathematical Society today—

Richard Kane (1944-2010)
Tuesday October 5th 2010

Kane, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, died October 1 at the age of 66. He received his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 1973 under the direction of Peter Hoffman. Kane authored approximately 30 research papers and the texts The Homology of Hopf Spaces and Reflection Groups and Invariant Theory. He served as president and vice-president of the Canadian Mathematical Society and was the recipient of the Society's first David Borwein Distinguished Career Award in 2004 and its Distinguished Service Award in 2006. Kane was a member of the AMS since 1991. Read more about his life in an online obituary.

Richard Michael Kane

I added a link to a review of Kane's book on reflection groups to the Wikipedia article on that topic on August 20, 2005.