On the streets, I am easily sidetracked, seduced. Born a rat, I would be a sucker every time for that Pied Piper man. Who can resist having a little look, like the peep that was offered only a few days ago inside The Case of the Female Orgasm, by Elisabeth A. Lloyd.
It is the irresistable sentence on page 23 , the one that runs – "As we can see the female orgasm turns out to be quite a bit more complicated than the simple knee-kick reflex".
Cassandra is calling out, but deaf to her warnings, and – Fasciculo di medicina – too late the knife is already in the hand of the young man dressed in an olive green tunic and black cap, the dissector of the accademia, who leans over the dead body of the young man lying on the trestle table in front of the Grand Anatomist’s chair. Look inside here, he is saying, on the title page – In comincia el dignissimo Fasiculo de medicina in volgare el quale tracta de tute le infirmitate del corpo humano & de la anotomia de quello : & multi altri tractati composti p[er] diuersi excelentissimi doctori con auctorita e testi prouadi : & prima la exposition del colore delle vrine e iudicio de quelle – written by Johannes de Ketham, that contains the first anatomic illustrations ever to be printed.
As we can see, the Italian translation – Venice: Sta[m]pito per Zuane & Gregorio di Gregorii, nel 1493 – with the four elegant woodblock plates added to the original edition in Latin that had been printed three years earlier, reveal in the novel and desirable style of Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna the dead man to be entirely naked.
On the streets along the water margins of Venice,
the Piper’s tune is ringing in our ears,
muthoplokos
being one of his other surviving names – the one that Sappho leaves in fragment 188 –
‘mythweaver’.
mmj