AtdTDA: [38] p. 1068 "Full Fuckin Circle. . . ."

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Yet another Pink Tab, a large American population, some, 
perhaps, thanatoids. But above all we see tourists in the
realm of the stylishly morose, the patrons of "a theater full 
of sadness from a long forgotten show":

          But most were the American young, untouched,
          children with spending money but no idea of 
          what it would or wouldn't buy, come toddling as 
          if down the dark willow-lined approach to some 
          sort of Club Europa of the maimed and gassed 
          and fever-racked, whose members had been 
          initiated by way of war, starvation, and Spanish influenza. 
          AtD p. 1068

          In the character of Castillo I was trying for a sort of 
          world-weary Middle-European effect, and put in the 
          phrase grippe espagnole, which I had seen on 
          some liner notes to a recording of Stravinsky's 
          L'Historie du Soldat. I must have thought this was 
          some kind of post-World War I spiritual malaise or 
          something. Come to find out it means what it says, 
          Spanish influenza, and the reference I lifted was 
          really to the worldwide flu epidemic that followed 
          the war. 
          Slow Learner, p. 16

No telephone at L' Hemisphere, a lovely little luddite flourish:

          . . . .the owner believed that the instrument was another 
          sort of plague, which would spread through and eventually 
          destroy Montparnasse.

. . . ."V." lovers out there—tell me of other allusions to V. found in 
Rue du Depart, the road of departure and the sadness of departure 
at the very same time. Very much Tristero, the realm of sadness, 
of disinheritance, of those thought of as the unrecoverable past.

Meanwhile, we're back with Kit in Torino, and it might as well be Denver          

          "Can you believe this place? 
          Not a crooked street far's you can see."

Zhukovsky transformation: 

          Zhukovsky's transformation is the map from C to C given 
          by w = z + 1/z (or more generally w = z + a2/z).

          It was studied by Zhukovsky because the image of a circle 
          which passes through the point z = 1 or z = -1 is a curve 
          similar to the cross-section of an aircraft wing or propeller.

          One of the curious and useful facts about differentiable 
          complex functions is that their real and imaginary parts 
          satisfy Laplace's Equation (a partial differential equation 
          important in many applications from Electricity to Hydrodynamics).

          Composing with Zhukovsky's function allows one to take the 
          symmetric flow of fluid past a circular cylinder and transform 
          it into the unsymmetric flow past such an aerofoil. One can 
          then calculate the characteristics of such a flow.

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Miscellaneous/Aerofoil.html

Note how the wing section curves into a circle in the Zhukovsky transformation.

          "Every wing section you'll come across looks just like a circle 
          after a Zhukovsky transformation, Airfoil design's shameful 
          secret. Tell no one."