Julie/Julia- Single Minded Devotion

Julie/Julia is the story of a blogger telling the tale of cooking her way through Julia Child’s Masting The Art of French Cooking. Which is why the book was written, right? So someone could work their way through it and become a French Chef on the other end. But the odds are good that no one ever did cook all the recipes in MtAoFC, or any other cookbook for that matter. So several years ago, when blogs were an unknown element and a governmental secretary decided to start The Julie/Julia Project, it make news-real news, not just bloggy news.

This is a great read, and Julie is very found of good old fashioned Anglo-Saxon words for various bodily functions and especailly the one for sex. There may have seven words you can’t say on television, but you have always been able to say whatever the fuck you wanted to in a blog. And Julie did. Oh, and she cooked a bit as well.

The book Julie/Julia was not what I expected-it’s just a book. There are a handful of blog excerpts here and there, but never even so much as one full blog post-unless she wrote really, really short posts. It is the story of how she got the idea, how it took over her life, and all the things that were going on around the time that she was doing The Project. Since a blog is more of a moment by moment event, most blogs don’t have a sense of narrative, there is no beginning, middle, or end, it just starts and stops.

If The Julie/Julia Project were started today I don’t think it would even crack the Top 100 on Technorati-though it was enough of a rage to set Julie Powell up for life five years ago. It is still under 3000 on Alexa, which is not bad for a blog that hasn’t been updated in four years. But now everyone and thier dog has a blog, and every possible topic has its own group of blogs talking about it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a handful of bloggers working their way through cookbooks of their own even as I blog. But I would be greatly shocked if any of them turned that blog into a successful career.

Julie didn’t think of blogging as an end in itself, she was not making three cents a click on ads for Kitchenaide or iGourmet. There were no paid posts, or paid links, or 125×125 ads to put in your sidebar. The only money that Julie mentions making directly from her blog came from a begging button to her Paypal Account. She also recieved a number of ‘care packages’ from her loyal readers.

She was pretty far sighted on many aspects of blogging, but there is one term that she coined which I am glad did not catch on-Blogs+Readers=Bleaders. While it is kind of a cute idea, in a Dexter sort of way, I don’t much like it. I have never thought of my readers as anything but ‘readers.’ Bleaders implies a bit more devotion that I really want.

But then, Julie is all about the devotion, to her husband, her crappy job, her insane friends-both on and off the blog, and to Julia Child’s Master the Art of French Cooking. If Edison had had Julie on his team they would have solved the lightbulb problem a good four or five years earlier. It’s all I can do to post once a day, and there are times when I shouldn’t even be doing that. The fact that she had a name for The Julie/Julia Project is scary enough in itself-who has names for things like cooking every recipe in a cookbook?

Sprinkled throughout Julie & Julia:365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen- are little snipets of Julia Child’s romance with Paul and little hints at the craziness of her becoming an expert on French Cooking. These little asides are fun, and it is nice to get a glimse of the woman who inspired Julie’s madness forty years later.

Julie & Julia is a great book, and not just because the headline reads Blogger Makes Good. It’s possible for any of us to think, well, take a year of my life and it would be make griping reading too-but the fact of the matter is, well, no it wouldn’t. They are making it into a movie-Meryl Streep is set to play Julia Child- but I am really a book person, so read the book. You won’t be sorry.