Babies from Cambridge

 

By PETER STOTHARD

The cover of the latest Cambridge Literary Review (not illustrated here) shows a baby in a glass box.

The butterfly mobiles and bedroom pictures suggest that she has been there for longer than for post-natal intensive care.

Peridot is the daughter of a professor from Cambridge, Massachusetts whose early concern for ‘perfect control of her environment’ creates a woman both saucy and sexless.

Or so she is at the beginning of Donald Barthelme’s uncollected story, ‘The Ontological Basis of Two’, originally published under a pseudonym in 1963 for the men's literary magazine Cavalier (a 1966 issue illustrated above).

Later Peridot is freed — to the pleasure of the narrator and one of many post-modern pleasures in CLR 5, edited by Boris Jardine and Lydia Wilson, which also includes a fine essay by David Hendy on another forgotten magazine, Wireless World, and some ‘intoxicating’ techno-fiction of fifty years before.

Comments

[David Martin]

Although it's possible, with reference to the magazine "Cavalier", to quibble about the use of the word "literary" in the phrase "the mens’ literary magazine", there's surely general agreement that the other adjective should be "men's".

[PStothard]

christmas greetings to all . . and apologies for what mary beard, i think, once called the 'kitchen breakfast table punctuation'. . .unforgivable, except maybe on christmas day . . .