November 1, 2021
Rescuing the past to inform the present. Lamenting a culture "prone to forgetfulness" and characterized by rapidly accelerating events, Brooks asserts the need to frame experience in history. "The most useful formulation going forward," she writes, "may be a phrase, just four words, easy to remember when all the details have disappeared. It will likely as not apply to almost any conceivable contingency." Those words: "Here we go again." Considering the apparent eruption of gun violence, for example, Brooks notes that the nearly 2,000 mass shootings that occurred in the U.S. between 2014 to 2019 emerged from a nation beset by violence and awash in guns even since its earliest days. In 1966--three years after the JFK assassination and with scenes of the Vietnam War widely televised--Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old architectural engineering student, climbed a tower at the University of Texas and enacted the first modern mass shooting, killing 16 and wounding 23. Therefore, writes the author, subsequent mass shooting--Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Columbine, Las Vegas--may not have been as random as they seemed. As Brooks excavates the past, she considers the changing natures of secrecy and privacy as well as the impetus to self-disclosure that has impelled obsessive diarists for generations. She looks at the ubiquity of data collection, asking what statistics reveal and what they hide. Although thousands of snapshots amassed on smartphones record "fitful movements of memory," neither data nor snapshots, Brooks believes, can capture the fullness of stories: Only stories can keep the past from becoming "an abstraction." "As oblivion approaches," she writes, "it may be time to go old school, to tell stories that slow the acceleration down, to practice acts of true attention. In this way, we might keep alive one of the only old questions that still matters: How did all this happen?" A digressive, lyrical meditation on the meaning of memory.
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November 8, 2021
Brooks (In the City), a literature professor at the New School, investigates the “cultural obsolescence” of “the act of remembering” in this impressionistic and vague consideration. It’s broken into five sections: shooters, soldiers, secrets, statistics, and snapshots. Brooks first takes on gun violence, which she writes saturates American culture, examining the 1966 shootings at the University of Texas, Austin, back further to Kennedy’s assassination, through the television news coverage of the Vietnam War, and then forward to the contemporary prevalence of mass shootings (including a somewhat unnerving side journey into the life of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza’s mother). She next addresses the “vicarious warrior culture in which most of us just watch from afar” and chronicles the pervasiveness of military language, thanks in part to the arrival of the nuclear age. In “Statistics” she writes that “the market for data-driven decisions has exploded,” and that “every statistic can be unpacked so that the story at its heart emerges, like a lost language one has to relearn.” In the final chapter, Brooks muses on photography’s ability to capture reality and the past: “Most of the time we hardly notice, but it’s striking how quickly the past becomes an abstraction.” While the questions Brooks asks are urgent, her answers often feel cryptic and meandering. The idea has potential, but it’s not quite realized.
December 15, 2021
Starting with the first mass shooting in American history (Charles Whitman's gun assault from a tower at the University of Texas-Austin in 1966), award-winning essayist Brooks revisits shocking historical events such as this to explore how they shape the questions we ask and impact us on both personal and collective levels. Her careful handling of details thrusts readers into the past, as if to say, ""This is exactly what happened. Now what do we make of it?"" She applies this approach to tragic events but also to data-driven conclusions, diarists' subjective viewpoints, and snapshots of individual lives. In this way, Brooks ruminates upon the past while reframing events to challenge our present perceptions of what matters most when we look back and formulate life lessons. Brooks asserts that the human story should never be overlooked. This is a sophisticated, thoughtful collection that should be read with the kind of care that Brooks instilled into each provocative essay.
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