Mallory's Camera

Lotsa smutty dreams last night!

They were fun even though dream orgasms are kinda weird, lacking any somatic specificy.

But when I woke up, I had to wonder: Why were you dreaming that??




I suppose because I spent a big chunk of the day in bed reading Paula McLain’s Love and Ruin.

Love and Ruin purports to be a fictional tell-all about the disastrous marriage between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn.

Classic chick lit! Or clit lit, as I dubbed the genre in my youth.

The book isn’t exactly bad.

Obviously, it’s very readable, or I wouldn’t have spent four hours reading it.

I dunno.

I guess I don’t quite understand how a writer can devote 150 pages to describing the Spanish Civil War without once mentioning the word “fascism.”

Also, although the status details are obviously quite different, the authorial voice animating Gelhorn is identical to the authorial voice animating Hadley in McLain’s earlier Hemingway Wife fictional bio (whose name I now forget.)

So, I gotta think I was reading what Paula McLain might have experienced had she gone off to Lorca-land, trailing in Papa’s wake.

At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone.



War is fascinating for some reason.

And, of course, everybody wants to romanticize the underdog—even if the underdog, as a political entity, is every bit as corrupt as the villainous victor presumptive.

I remember reading the Iliad for the first time when I was 10 or so, and absolutely falling in ❤️LUV❤️ with Hector, an early Zelensky prototype!

Meanwhile, one does feel horrified for the victims of war—I almost wrote “innocent victims of war” there but I caught myself because practically nobody deserves that kind of violence except maybe serial killers.

Could you make some kind of argument that a Head of State who launches a war that results in thousands of civilian deaths is actually a serial killer?

I suppose.



My favorite quote about the Trojan War doesn’t come from the Iliad.

No, it comes from Hamlet:

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?

Hamlet has been watching a play within a play and sneers this as an aside to the actual audience… watching Hamlet!

A mirror within a mirror, in other words: Hamlet doesn't quite get the fact that he's a character in a play!

Gotta love it.

Shakespeare does the best rhetorical questions!



The other thing I didn’t like about Love and Ruin is that it features lots of what I like to call “clutch and claw” sex between Hemingway and Gelhorn.

Except that Gelhorn is on record as saying she never had a single orgasm with Hemingway.

Gelhorn wrote this after the marriage exploded in a letter to one of her many correspondents. It’s right there in Gelhorn’s Collected Letters. A well-known bit of literary trivia.

Hemingway apparently was so embittered by his inability to bring Gelhorn to orgasm that in later life, he belittled her savagely. He wrote a poem— To Martha Gellhorn's Vagina—in which he compared said anatomy to the wrinkled neck of an old hot-water bottle.

So, you know. Love and Ruin. Historically inaccurate!



I read Love and Ruin because I’m writing a kind of unsung-consort-to-the-Great-Man fictionalized biography myself, so I’m naturally very interested in other writers’ takes on the subject.

It’s funny.

June's voice in the June novel isn’t anything like my voice in this diary.

June's voice is the voice of barely controlled hysteria.

I didn’t plan it that way. That’s just what came out when I decided to channel June Miller.

The novel would probably be much more commercial if I were using the voice I use in this diary. Lucius once told me I should write everything in my first-person diary voice and then just transpose it into the third person as needed. He thought my first-person diary voice was very appealing. Of course, the June novel is first-person. But not this voice!!

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Meanwhile, today promises to be busy-busy-busy!

Busy-busy-busy is good!