Hawthorne & Ozmosis or Pyncheon's Daguerreotype is a Masquerade

[alice wellintown]

see Tanner on Blithesdale Romance. He discusses this chapter.
Pynchon's parody of the movies, the worn out flapping strips clicking
through the projector world projected, seem tired to me eyes. I can't
read it again. The puzzle pieces slide off the table and get swept up
and into the dustbin. Itz not even stoopid funny.


Among them was an Indian chief, with blanket, feathers and war-paint,
and uplifted tomahawk; and near him, looking fit to be his
woodland-bride, the goddess Diana, with the crescent on her head, and
attended by our big, lazy dog, in lack of any fleeter hound. Drawing
an arrow from her quiver, she let it fly, at a venture, and hit the
very tree behind which I happened to be lurking. Another group
consisted of a Bavarian broom-girl, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one
or two foresters of the middle-ages, a Kentucky woodsman in his
trimmed hunting-shirt and deerskin leggings, and a Shaker elder,
quaint, demure, broad-brimmed, and square-skirted. Shepherds of
Arcadia, and allegoric figures from the Faerie Queen, were oddly mixed
up with these. Arm in arm, or otherwise huddled together, in strange
discrepancy, stood grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary
officers, with three -cornered cocked-hats, and queues longer than
their swords. A bright-complexioned, dark-haired, vivacious little
gipsy, with a red shawl over her head, went from one group to another,
telling fortunes by palmistry; and Moll Pitcher, the renowned old
witch of Lynn, broomstick in hand, showed herself prominently in the
midst, as if announcing all these apparitions to be the offspring of
her necromantic art. But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree near
by, in his customary blue frock, and smoking a short pipe, did more to
disenchant the scene, with his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee
observation, than twenty witches and necromancers could have done, in
the way of rendering it weird and fantastic.