And so, comes an end to the year “M.” Back in 1999, I was unhappy with the prospect of labeling files with a lot of zeroes. I had long since developed the habit of labeling photographs and documents partially or completely by the date, in computer order (YYMMDD), but the switch from such nice big numbers as 990704 to 000106 was discomfiting. So I decided to substitute “A” for the “00” part of 2000, and I’ve stuck with that ever since. There is a real chance that I won’t have to think about what to do after “Z”; if I’m still alive, I doubt that I’ll be fussed. It is mildly surprising to have reached “N.” Place your cursor over the photograph and you’ll see how it works. (The “a” signifies that this is the first image to be so dated; it will probably be the only one, but you can’t be too sure. The “x770” means that I have reduced the image size to the width of 770 pixels. What a bureaucrat I’d have made!)

***

A friend gave me a delightful little Christmas present, just the sort of unexpected treat that I adore. It’s an odd-shaped book of puzzles. On each of two facing pages, there appear six line drawings that sketch relatively obscure frames from 100 well-known movies. Name That Movie is the title of Paul Rogers’s appealing teaser. Rogers draws a quirky line that’s highly reminiscent of New Yorker illustrator James Stevenson, and I see that what has always excited me about Stevenson is that each one of his drawings looks like a clue, even in the absence of mystery.

“Relatively obscure” is a relative term. Almost every one of Rogers’s sketches after films by Alfred Hitchcock is completely obvious. The “R O T” matchbook — are you kidding. The fact that most of the hundred movies are rather more difficult to identify, however, is testament to the power of Hitchcock’s vision. It is also true that I have spent a lot of time watching Hitchcock movies, if not necessarily the ones that Rogers has chosen. (The Birds is a movie that, having seen it four times at the most, I may never see again.)

Paging through the book, I readily solved slightly more than half of the puzzles. Then I had to work — or not work, as the case might be. After a while, I was making good guesses. Cleverly, there are two appendices at the end, one giving the answer to each numbered puzzle, the other an index of films. I steered clear of the answers. When it hit me that a big building with a “Dance Contest” sign, three pictures away from a traffic sign pointing the way to the Verazzano Narrrow Bridge and Staten Island, might be taken from Saturday Night Fever, I was able to confirm this with a glance at the index.

Now I’m down to about 25 unsolved puzzles. Some of them stir muted tingles of recognition. Others draw complete blanks. Two of Rogers’s movies, Day For Night and Cool Hand Luke, I saw for the first and only time in 2012, and it took a while to identify those drawings. At least one of the movies, The Postman Always Rings Twice, I was able to guess (on the strength of two drawings) even though I have never seen it. I’m going to give myself a year to solve the rest of the puzzles. Then I’ll look up the answers.

***

I finished reading Fire in the Lake last night. I really cannot recommend it highly enough. What with the news about the fiscal cliff on the front page of today’s Times, FitzGerald’s study of Vietnamese dysfunction, fueled by American dollars, seems spookily timely. (I am convinced that our reward for “winning” the Cold War was to succumb to all the problems of the old Communist régimes.)

In a new afterword, written a few years ago, FitzGerald notes that she finished work on the book in 1971 and was never tempted to update it. I can see why. Her picture of the struggle to adapt traditional Vietnamese culture to modern times, in the teeth of foreign interference, is so complete that there would be nothing to add, except to say that things turned out pretty much as she foresaw. (Her foresight, astonishingly accurate although rarely explicit, so deeply infuses the final section of the book that it is hard to believe and horrible to realize that the war had four pointless years to run when she finished typing.) And Frances FitzGerald is not the writer to point out that she called the shots.

Fire in the Lake is not only great history but powerful political philosophy as well. It raises sharp questions about the nature of democracy and the virtues of multi-party politics. I’m still in the middle of a meditation on what “the mandate of heaven” might be in secular terms — we don’t, for example, vote on the standards developed by engineers for the design of aircraft; do American states that are dominated by single parties manage better than more divided ones? — that I hope will continue well into the new year.

One very interesting footnote, especially considering how I came to re-read Fire in the Lake at all: there is no mention of one of the loudest American hawks, Joseph Alsop. (It would have been easy to slip him in, among references to David Halberstam’s opposite view.) At the time of writing, Joe Alsop was the husband of FitzGerald’s mother’s best friend. I must re-read FitzGerald’s introduction to the biography of that best friend, Susan Mary Alsop, for a possible clue.   

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2012 at 9:23 am.