Cohen: M&D & the Ampersand

[Glenn Scheper]

> ...that Pynchon was heavily involved in the design of the
> M&D cover and .... having that ampersand dominate it?

Well, for me the ampersand is merely an icon of re-entrancy,
a sign simplifying the interesting case of the Klein bottle.

Jesus, this girl has turned her web musings into two books,
and I can't imagine how to write a book on the important
topic of autofellatio and its concommitant metamorphosis:
http://www.lulu.com/ampersand

Google Image search finds many of the customary artistic
representations of a Klein bottle, a surface having only
a single circle of self-intersection, such as these:
http://www.quantonics.com/Quantum_Connection.html
http://math.stanford.edu/~henrys/Will_stuff/klein_bottle.JPG

But we may take the topology of the body to be a torus, for
in topology (the little I know) only through-holes matter,
dents and protrusions don't count. Oh, and Lacan conceives
a model of the mind (a homologue of the body) as a torus,
and mental illness as various cuts upon it. For a torus is
equivalent to a thick cylinder, such as this nice picture:
http://www.physicsdaily.com/physics/List_of_moments_of_inertia

And the body is such a shape, pierced by the alimentary canal.

If you consider the genital to be merely a feature on the
side--where Adam's rib was removed--of the cylinder, and
imagine the top of the cylinder as mouth, and deform the
cylinder, so the mouth folds over to attach the genital
--a matter of predation which is said to predominate in
Cloud Atlas--you will begin to form such a Klein bottle.

Trying to draw a moment ago, I only confused myself.

But imagine the inner surface of the thick cylinder,
the small R1 mathematical cylinder, a surface only,
were not fixed in it's place, but could move, dance
around like a mathmatical trace, a lissajous figure.

Now see its excursions exceed the outer cyliner, R2.
See its excursions so out of place, at least for the
upper part of the cylinder R1, that its join to the
upper lip of the thick cylinder is no longer from the
lip downward, but has been streched out of its place
so that it meets the R1 of the lip from above. Then,
somewhere, it was pulled right through the side, as
in my Adam exercise, the classic artistic rendition.

Pynchon of course, would know these things.

It is the ground of metaphors in myth and religion,
and those literature classics able to endure epochs.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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