red herring or highbrow beard?

But the joke's on Hemingway. According to Lethem, men without women employ comic books to compensate for their absence. When his characters aren't listening to Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads, or dreaming up scenarios for interactive video games, or hiring out as "advertising robots" at the local Undermall, or destroying the world with air bags made of cabbages, they are thinking about Stan Lee and R. Crumb, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, and Captain America. If Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Walt Whitman, and Carl Jung show up in "Super Goat Man," the most ambitious of these stories, they are really only red herrings or highbrow beards in an epic tale of an Electric Comics superhero from the Sixties who is reduced in the Eighties to teaching a college seminar on "Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955–1975."

...read it all: Welcome to New Dork, by John Leonard, New York Review of Books, 7 April 2005

swans sacred for V

Swans were sacred to the goddess...because the V-formation of their flight was a female symbol, and because, at mid-summer, they flew north to unknown breeding grounds, supposedly taking the dead king's soul with them.

"Tyche and Nemesis"
Robert Graves
The Greek Myths: 1, p. 126

Leda and the Swan (16th century)
Paolo Veronese [CORBIS/Bettman source]