Trapped In the Present Tense: Meditations on American Memory

by Colette Brooks

Overview

For readers of Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Odell, this poetic and inventive blend of history, memoir, and visual essay reflects on how we can resist the erasure of our collective memory in this American century.

Our sense of our history requires us to recall the details of time, of experiences that help us find our place in the world together and encourage us in the search for our individual identities. When we lose sight of the past, our ability to see ourselves and to understand one another is diminished.

In this book, Colette Brooks explores how some of the more forgotten aspects of recent American experiences explain our challenging and often puzzling present. Through intimate and meticulously researched retellings of individual stories of violence, misfortune, chaos, and persistence—from the first mass shooting in America from the tower at the University of Texas, the televised assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, life with nuclear bombs and the Doomsday Clock, obsessive diarists and round-the-clock surveillance, to pandemics and COVID-19—Brooks is able to reframe our country’s narratives with new insight to create a prismatic account of how efforts to reclaim the past can be redemptive, freeing us from the tyranny of the present moment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640093324
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/08/2022
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,125,551
Product dimensions:	6.29(w) x 9.27(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

COLETTE BROOKS has published two books and many literary essays. Her first book, In the City: Random Acts of Awareness, won a PEN/Jerard Fund Award for a distinguished work of nonfiction. Her second book, Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries, was a finalist for the Grub Street National Book Prize in nonfiction.

Table of Contents

Preface 3

Shooters 5

Soldiers 67

Secrets 115

Statistics 149

Snapshots 173

Postscript 223

Selected Photo Credits 225

Acknowledgments 229

Editorial Reviews

11/08/2021

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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Brooks is paying her respects to fleeting but meaningful episodes in our history, pushing back against our culture’s waves of forgetting . . . By preserving the capacity to be surprised, she concludes, we may be more open to keeping memory alive . . . [Brooks] has done just this.” —Michael S. Roth, The Washington Post

"Extremely refreshing . . . A work of literature that’s beautiful, uncategorizable, sad, and challenging. In other words, a book that’s very near life itself." —Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Hyperallergic

"A collection of light-footed philosophical essays . . . Brooks deftly draws out parallels between the lives of famed historical figures and individuals who led 'lowercase lives.' She consecrates both types in these pages." —Rhoda Feng, The Brooklyn Rail

"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 . . . This is a sophisticated, thoughtful collection that should be read with the kind of care that Brooks instilled into each provocative essay." —Booklist

"Evocative . . . Whether it's gun violence, nuclear war or government incursions on Americans' privacy, Brooks's concerns are broad and vital . . . Colette Brooks cogently assesses an array of modern American problems through the lens of history and recollection." —Shelf Awareness

"[A] lyrical meditation on the meaning of memory." —Kirkus Reviews

"What is a memory? Colette Brooks searchingly explores this question, one so fundamental we never really ask it, to uncover the sinuous paths by which public and private information intersect and mutate to form something quite separate from events as they occurred. Brooks doesn’t merely describe but rather enacts this process. In prose that moves between urgent, reflective, and intimate registers, she makes vivid how the news—in all its evolving but always insistent forms—has colonized our most intimate selves. Trapped in the Present Tense charts this new consciousness and takes astute stock of its social and emotional implications." —Albert Mobilio, author of Same Faces

“Colette Brooks is that rarest of writers: an original. Her ruminative, visionary, forensic meditation on enduring American pathologies, with its rich trove of visual artifacts, is both riveting and deeply mysterious.” —Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach and A Visit from the Goon Squad

"One of the pleasures of reading Colette Brooks is relinquishing what I thought I knew about her subjects. The startling clarity of her thinking, the lucidity of her sentences, and her knack for knowing where to look transform whatever she's writing about into something strangely unfamiliar and thrilling. And in Trapped in the Present Tense, a moving meditation on American life, Brooks reveals the contemporary moment to be both mournfully inevitable and utterly unexpected." —Alexander Halberstadt, author of Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

From the Publisher

2021-10-07
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.

Kirkus Reviews