Rainbow & Parabola (was NP)

[Dave Monroe]

I'm constantly astonished by just how very little
imagination is dispalyed here, how little poetic
license is granted here, by and to supposedly literary
types.  Esp. given the extraordinarily wide berth
granted for such similitudes in
an-actually-quite-interesting-indeed essay recently
published by the least imaginative and/or licentious
of the lot.  Yeah, Robt., it was pretty obvious to
which self-exiled list member yr snipe--made
ostensibly at Otto, but ...--was really directed.  Why
is it, on the rare occasions I bother to read these
things, I always manage to catch something like that? 
Or is it ALWAYS like that?  And I couldn't work up the
level of stuffy-to-the-point-of-smothering--not to
mention, if not exctly irrelevant, certainly beside
(to the point of falling entirely outside the frame
...) the point--pretension which follows if I tried
(everything to this point has been fairly effortless
on my part ...).  You've too much free time to post
here, elsewhere, to  be inflicting this kind of stuff
on hapless undergraduates as well.  I hope ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> on 24/7/04 9:40 AM, jbor wrote:
> 
> > And, of course, a rainbow is neither a parable
> > nor a parabola.
> 
> I guess there is a faint possibility that Pynchon,
> an undergraduate physics major and missile
> specialist at Boeing, in retitling his novel (it was
> originally going to be called "mindless pleasures",
> cf. GR 270, 681) didn't realise that a rainbow isn't
> a parabola, or that he was working on the principle
> that "near enough is good enough".
> 
> The only way to equate the trajectory of a
> projectile under the force of gravity with the arc
> of a rainbow is via the rhetorical scheme (or trope)
> of Parabola, defined as a "resemblance mystical"
> (Puttenham, _The Arte of English Poesy_, 1569), and
> thus as a function of language and communication
> (some might say intersubjectivity, or poetic
> licence, or "transformation", or even "spin").
> 
> Another point to note is that a rainbow is an
> optical effect experienced by a viewer, and that it
> is always therefore dependent upon the individual
> viewer's vantage and perception.


		
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