Word: medusa
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Braided Initials. Some stylists specialize in bizarre-sounding cornrowing variations such as the Ashia from Kenya, the Nzinga from Nigeria, and the Umoja from Egypt. The majority, however, adhere to cornrowing basics −stick-up or tied-down short braids, or Medusa-like strands sliding down the head. Customers often make specific requests for patterns that include their own braided initials. The price rises with the complexity of styling and ranges from $3.50 to $150. Because braids can remain neat and clean for several weeks, however, cornrowing reduces annual coiffure costs for those accustomed to weekly stylings...
Some of his boxes are so perverse in their tawdriness that they resemble a makeup case for Medusa. Every object is overloaded to bursting with visual acerbity, mocking the very idea of everyday use. There is no way of using any of the Chair Transformations that Samaras made in 1969-70; one cannot sit on a cage of plastic flowers, or a chair of white formica which, halfway, turns into a mess of varicolored wool, or a seat with a five-inch spike rising from its exact center...
Barth's Perseus is twenty years past the glorious days of the slaying of Medusa--he is impotent, his wife sleeps around. Pegasus can no longer fly and Bellerophon has become a professor of literature. Barth's heroes have unheroic self-doubts, think dirty thoughts, study poli sci and get high on hippomenes. Zeus, in the form of a high school drop-out, rapes unsuspecting women and Bellerophon is dismissed by all as another quack would-be hero. Heroic love is forever lost in the sexual profusion and confusion of these post-Freudian ancient Greeks...
Barth's trick is to bend the old Golden Bough into fairy tales about the ordinary daily reality of archetypes. So we find Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, bogged down in middle age and suffering from what might be called hero's block. "You saw how it was," he says to his mistress, a nymph. "The kids were grown and restless; Andromeda and I had become different people; our marriage was on the rocks. The kingdom took care of itself; my fame was sure enough-but I'd lost my shine with golden locks...
Perseus gets the chance to recapture his youth when Athena re-Gorgonizes Medusa. Only this time Perseus has to pull off the caper without the old tricks -winged shoes, helmet of invisibility, etc. The problem is akin to that of an experienced novelist who cannot use old techniques to write a new novel, and Barth seems to get quite a chuckle...