It's Only A Paper Rose

What I just finished reading

Nothing this week, alas. Coming off the tail end of a couple of extremely busy weeks. However, I have today after my class and all of tomorrow blocked off...reading time, here I come!

What I'm currently reading

The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore. I was surprised to realize I'm actually nearly done with this book—the footnotes are so extensive that they take up a good fifty-plus pages in the end. Lepore's clearly done her research her, conducting interviews with currently-living members of the Marston-Holloway-Byrne family and going through what had to be mountains of personal papers to construct her biographical narrative, as well as placing Wonder Woman's creation firmly within the context of the time, showing the links between her stories and the art and rhetoric of the suffragist and New Woman movements. I kind of feel for Marston; after decades as an incredibly-smart polymath with little to show career-wise for his efforts (his self-aggrandizing personality made him a bad fit for academia, and neither his scholarly or fiction writing earned him any real acclaim, in likely part due to an intolerance for the criticism required to become good at something), he has a wildly successful pop culture character preaching his feminist values—and whom other writers are practically champing at the bit to turn into a secretary, a helpless damsel, or a sex object. Which becomes something of a problem when he contracts polio and can't keep up with the punishing daily-newspaper-strip publication pace.

I'm really enjoying Lepore's ability to avoid either lionizing or minimizing Marston's personality; given his role in feminist history, it had to have been tempting to hold him up as an ideal ally figure, or else magnify the problematic aspects of his philosophy (he believed strongly in the angelic nature of women, for instance, and his personal life didn't always match up with his principles—the family story has it that when he took up with Byrne, he told Holloway that either Byrne could come to live with them or he'd divorce her. Not precisely the sort of feminist poly hero I'd envisioned). She manages to do neither, and her biography feels much the richer for its complex portrayals of complicated people.

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery

I swear, at this point I kind of want to write a nonfiction book titled This Is Getting Ridiculous: Why the Long-Form Two-Part Colon-Separated Comma-Listing Nonfiction Title Is Unnecessary, Overused, and Distracting. :P Gripes about the title aside, this is another of Kean's enjoyable popular science books. Possibly my favorite point discussed so far is the way our brain operates along two entirely separate tracks—one logical and one emotional. This is hardly new information to anyone who's ever, say, fallen in love, but it turns out the systems are physically separated in the brain as well. And in case you've ever thought your decision-making processes would be better off without your emotions, take the case of Elliot: a responsible accountant and loving husband who, after a traumatic injury to his prefrontal cortex, completely lost the ability to make decisions. Even "where do you want to go for dinner tonight" was a multi-step process involving carefully weighing the respective restaurants' merits and drawbacks, driving by each of them to see how busy they were, etc...and even after that he was still stumped—without any kind of emotional attachment he couldn't say "I feel like Chinese tonight". Similarly, his work suffered due to his inability to prioritize tasks—he'd get caught up filing (and re-filing) paperwork and let his actual work slide. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he proceeded to make a series of (what we would call) completely boneheaded life moves; after (perhaps inevitably) his wife divorced him and he lost his job, he married a call girl and put most of his savings into a shady investment scheme, both of which turned out about how you'd expect.

What was most fascinating was that, if you proposed these situations to him as a hypothetical, he would absolutely agree that, say, marrying a prostitute you've known for a month is a Bad Idea and probably won't turn out well; but without that emotional urgency in his brain going "Hey! Don't do this! It's a bad plan!", to him it was all pretty much the same. (I find some interesting parallels to talking to someone in the grip of what poly people call New Relationship Energy, that notoriously strong and illogical sense that Your New Person Is The Best Ever; anyone who's tried to explain to a friend in a not-great relationship why their new relationship is not-great knows precisely this reaction of "oh yeah, I see what you mean, that's not great", completely divorced from any sense of "oh hey, my relationship that I'm in right now is Not Great!". Oh, chemistry.) Still, his new temperament did have one bit advantage: he might have been completely impaired with regards to decision making, but at least none of the crappy outcomes of his decisions ever bothered him much.

What I plan to read next

Um. Definitely trying to get back to Yoga Sequencing this week. And...well...we'll see!

Recently my mother watched Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, and we had a good time discussing its strengths and flaws. (In case anyone's curious, we thought it had an interesting portrayal of both the happy and uncomfortable dynamics of a poly relationship, good chemistry between the leads, and a real strength in Elizabeth's character in how she's the kind of Beatrice-esque sharp-wit-hides-a-genuine-vulnerability woman that so many movies attempt and so few achieve; we also were frustrated with how the screenplay puts Olive in an almost entirely passive role, and throws historical accuracy largely out the window in favor of a censorship/fighting-social-norms plot that doesn't really go anywhere.)

In any case, since we were so annoyed about the unnecessary alterations from the historical record, we thought it'd be fun to read The Secret History of Wonder Woman this month and talk about it. And since I have a lot of book-loving (and feminist-history-loving) friends both here and on Facebook, I thought this might be a fun use of social media—after all, discussions like these are much more fun with multiple perspectives! I'm thinking I'll post here at the start of next month and we can all write about our thoughts in the comments...let's encourage more thoughtful longer-form discussion online! Care to join us?

ETA for clarity: No need to watch the film, though if you want to it might be another point for discussion. But I imagine there'll be plenty to discuss just from the book. :)