Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: December 2002

Passages

December 10, 2002
5 Comments

My grandmother, Zoe Warner Durrell, passed away this morning. I’m going to talk about it a little, because I want to say some things about her and this is a place where I talk about that which is meaningful to me.

It was very peaceful. She had just moved into the home of my Aunt Zoe and Uncle Jeff, leaving her assisted living home; everyone was very happy about that. My father had spent Thanksgiving with them all. Everyone in the family had spent some time with her in the last year or so. She’d been ill since last winter. When my father called me this morning, it was not shocking.

Grandmama was a matriarch in the classic sense. She had always had a firm vision of what the family should be, and let us know when we slipped. Not in a bad way. There’s something to be said for firm guidance, and I am happy to have inherited my concepts of politesse and nobility from her. We’re preppies, albeit rather lapsed ones in my generation. I don’t say this very often, but I am proud of my heritage.

She lived through amazing changes. I am embarassed to admit that I’m not sure of her exact age, but then, it would be wrong to talk of it in public in any case. She’d seen most of the last century. The world never baffled her. In this past year, she’d gotten an email device, which she was happy to use with assistance. It’s easy to forget how much the aged have seen, but Grandmama was not one to be underestimated.

She and Grandpapa lived well and graciously. He was a publisher, originally in New York and then on a smaller scale in Kennebunkport. I know of fewer more noble occupations. I hope to follow in those footsteps, someday. When she moved to North Carolina, after he passed away, she donated her Kennebunkport house to the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust.

I am told that her memory was slipping, towards the end. It must have been difficult for her. She was exceedingly lucid when I visited her last spring, which is precisely what I would have expected. She was an author, not terribly prolific, but it’s another aspect of her that impressed and influenced me. In any case, she died content and happy that her family was doing well.

I hope that I’ve lived up to her standards. I hope that I continue to do so. I will miss her terribly.

Whatcha wanna know?

December 9, 2002
2 Comments

Bartleby.com is the best Web resource I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a solid, fast, all-in-one-place site with quality reference books ranging from the Columbia Encyclopedia through Strunk and White’s Elements of Style past Bulfinch’s Age of Fable to Gray’s Anatomy. Sweet. If that’s not enough, there’s also an extensive collection of verse, an equally extensive collection of fiction, and a big fat bunch of essays. Yeah, it’s all free.

Science fiction double feature

December 9, 2002
4 Comments

That was another busy movie weekend. Two SF flicks, which had more in common than you might think (above and beyond both being surefire money losers): Equilibrium and Solaris.

I was determined to catch Equilibrium, since I missed Below and am still annoyed about it. Equilibrium is only on about 300 screens, too. I’m really glad I did. It’s a sometimes awkward graft of a unique action aesthetic onto a fairly standard totalitarian dystopia, which somehow works very well. The backbone of the movie is the near future dictatorship we’ve seen before: it’s Farenheit 451 via Albert Speer’s Berlin. The director, Kurt Wimmer, gets it right. It’s almost as pretty as anything by Wim Wenders.

Here and there, though, John Preston (our redeemed hero, played by Christian Bale) breaks into utterly lovely gun-based action sequences which are both innovative in their integration of handguns and martial arts and well-filmed. The first, five minutes in, is illuminated solely by muzzle flashes. The last, which I won’t spoil, is a veritable hammerblow of intensity. Nice stuff.

I think that it all flows together so well because the sparseness of the film’s visuals meshes with the sparse economy of the action sequences. Little is wasted.

Emily Watson gets yet another role as the quietly inspiring female lead, and Sean Bean growls his way through a brief part. Taye Diggs is not so great, but what are you gonna do?

Meanwhile, Solaris. Wow, it’s hard to know where to start. Soderbergh has utterly returned to form. I think the most masterful thing about his directing is his understanding of pacing. Solaris could easily have seemed long and overdone; it alternates between being talky and more or less dialogue-free. Soderbergh skips through the story, touching down lightly here and there, and brings off a philosophy-heavy movie with graceful ease.

The acting is also fine. George Clooney is a bit too much George Clooney, which is probably inevitable at this point. Still, he conveys the pain of his character competently. Natascha McElhone is perfect. She’s got a really tough job, effectively having to portray two characters, and brings it off without a hitch.

At first, given the distinctly 70s look of the Persephone (the space station upon which the movie takes place), I thought Soderbergh was going for a 2001 homage. I think not, though; I think that he just wanted that 70s SF look in order to properly get across the sense of isolation that’s so central to the movie. I realized on later reflection how much of Soderbergh’s work has been about loss. Solaris is no exception, despite the redemptive quality of the ending.

It doesn’t get much better than this for intelligent, contemplative science fiction film.

Is that your final?

December 9, 2002
Leave a Comment

I have just a little more on the Ninth Circuit gun control decision, to start off the morning. How Appealing pretty much sums it up here, here, and here. This is why he’s a practicing lawyer and I’m just an interested party.

I was particularly interested in this SF Chronicle article, which talks about Judge Reinhardt and his approach to the law. It discusses what I think is admirable about the recent decision; namely, Judge Reinhardt’s tendency to confront cutting edge issues head on.

Solidifying one's political base

December 7, 2002
Leave a Comment

Daily Kos has an excellent summary of Trent Lott’s recent comments on Strom Thurmond. I, of course, have Cliffs Notes:

Trent Lott is our Senate Majority Leader. Strom Thurmond is the guy who ran for President in 1948 on a segregationist platform. Senator Lott’s comments include “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Followup, or recoil, or something

December 7, 2002
Leave a Comment

Eugene Volokh has some thoughts on that Ninth Circuit decision. Not bad; this is more of a start. However, he fails to recognize that the states prrrrobably have the right to change their definition of militia with the times. He also doesn’t touch the question of what “bear arms” means. I’d really like to see someone quoting a contemporary usage of “bear arms” outside the military context.

While I’m on the subject, here’s a Volokh article in the National Review. It doesn’t really address the Ninth Circuit decision, but it does have intelligent things to say about evolving standards. How Appealing comments on the article, somewhat snidely. Well, OK, it’s just a comment on the timeline.

Happiness is a warm court

December 6, 2002
1 Comment

Via How Appealing: the Ninth Circuit today concluded that the Second Amendment confers no individual right to own and carry arms. (That link is a PDF.) I recommend reading the opinion if you’re interested in such things. I suspect the language and arguments presented therein will be core to the gun control debate for some time, at least for those who are pro-gun control.

The argument seems to rest on the meaning of the phrase “keep and bear arms.” Judge Reinhardt’s opinion states that “bear arms” is a phrase used, historically, only in a military context. Quoting Aymette v. State, 21 Tenn. (2 Humph.) 154 (1840): “A man in pursuit of deer, elk and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms.” Given that interpretation, he further reasons that the phrase would be nonsensical if the phrase “keep arms” had a wider interpretation than the phrase “bear arms.”

I am brutally summarizing this, and I am not a lawyer. I really do recommend reading it if you intend to mention the ruling in polite company, or even form opinions on it for yourself.

Here’s a sort of a counter argument. He doesn’t include any actual reasoning beyond a list of cases which he claims contradict the Ninth Circuit decision. The first one cited is the same decision I quoted above; I think that he might have done well to at least explain why the decision supports him and not the Ninth Circuit. Naked argument by reference is so medieval. I am hoping to see more and better disagreement soon.

Glenn Reynolds links to an article of his which discusses the problems with the general class of argument made by the Ninth Circuit, which seems to be worth reading. It doesn’t really address the decision, though. Note in particular page 30 of the decision, which postulates a sort of feudalistic state militia system in which the armies of the states are subject to federal control. This counters Reynolds’ line of argument, which requires the state militias to be protection against a tyrannical federal government. (A pity. I’m sympathetic to that line of argument.)