Frank Bruni - Thank You, Julie Powell. I Owe You.
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Did Julie Powell catch a wave or set it in motion? Seize a moment or create it? That’s often the question about people who define their times as vividly as she did. All I know is that there was a line of demarcation, a Before Powell and an After Powell, and that following The Julie/Julia Project, which debuted in 2002, I noticed a new breed of dreamer, who came to the Big City not with a glossy headshot and dancing shoes but with a whisk and a flourless chocolate cake recipe.
And an internet connection. Powell, who died last week at the age of 49, straddled two trends, the proliferation of blogging and the surging interest in all things culinary, and she mingled them ingeniously in her Salon.com chronicle of one highly caloric year and one titanically ambitious task: to blanch, baste and blunder her way through the entirety of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” though she had a modest Queens kitchen and a modest clerical worker’s budget.
Powell completed that challenge, with many pratfalls and much profanity along the way. She found a degree of fame. And she memorialized her accomplishment in a book, “Julie & Julia,” that went on to sell more than a million copies.
I never met her, but I owe her, and not because I had the thrill of a brief, uncredited appearance in the movie version of that book, directed by Nora Ephron, who occasionally tucked her friends into her films as a gift and a goof. Like so many others who found purchase in the world of food over the past 20 years, I was indebted to Powell for democratizing that world, for demystifying it, for showing that it could and perhaps should be breached by people who came to it not with a gastronome’s formal training and fancy vocabulary but with passion, with personality, with Tums.
The year after Powell completed her Child marathon, I began an epicurean odyssey of my own, serving as the restaurant critic of The Times from June 2004 through August 2009. (That’s how I became friendly with Ephron, who liked to trade restaurant anecdotes and intelligence with me.) My appointment as critic was in many ways a non sequitur: I’d spent the previous two years as a foreign correspondent based in Rome, and the four years before that as a political reporter. I was more thoroughly versed in the making of legislation than in the making of sausage (though there’s a metaphoric kinship there).
But Powell and others like her had changed the terms of food writing, which was turning less preachy, more populist. The spirit of the times and of The Times was that curiosity mattered as much as erudition, that too much emphasis on classicism had too much classism in it. I’d never taken cooking lessons, but my hungry life had been one long eating lesson. I had a Ph.D. in gluttony. That was credential enough.
Before Powell, people certainly talked and argued about restaurants, and rushed to the newest ones. But After Powell, the number and variety of such people increased, as did their quickness to record their every judgment — their every bite — on the internet.
Before Powell, kitchen amateurs certainly emulated kitchen experts, boasting of their efforts and, when all went well, their accomplishments. But After Powell, this was less sideline habit than rite of passage for many young and relatively privileged Americans, who no longer treated a subpar oven and a dearth of counter space as a get-out-of-roasting-free card.
Powell wasn’t the engine of these awakenings, but she was an emblem of them, and in her way, she was an influence in the transformation of food into a new kind of playground, a new type of stage, crowded by creative, enterprising and just plain ravenous people who wanted to maximize the pride and the pleasure to be had in making and consuming delicious things.
In Ephron’s movie, I sit on a rooftop in Queens and clap for the glistening duck that Powell, played by Amy Adams, carries to the dinner table. It’s the final dish on her Child checklist. She’s done.
In life, I sit in the shadow of Powell, the patron saint of unconventional epicures, and applaud her daring and her example. What an appetite she had. What adventures she inspired. They’ll go on and on.
For the Love of Sentences
In last week’s installment, I ended with The Times, so let’s begin with it this week.
Here’s Mike Tanier on the disappointing performances of Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers during this season of the National Football League: “Declining skills, increasing salaries, prickly egos and long-indulged eccentricities hollow out pre-eminent quarterbacks from within. Mighty redwoods must fall so Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen can fully bask in the sunlight and saplings like Justin Herbert and Jalen Hurts have room to grow strong.” Mike also took note of Rodgers’s recent appearance at a postgame news conference “wearing what appeared to be a bathrobe; he looked like a cross between a Star Wars cosplayer and a young billionaire who just started jarring his toenail clippings.” (Thanks to Chris Wheatley of Port Ludlow, Wash., and Lindsey Luker of Boston for nominating these.)
Here’s Molly Young on the novels of Philip K. Dick: “Dick picked up on sinister cultural undercurrents the way a cat senses a can of tuna being opened six rooms away.” (Devin Callahan, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Gerrit Westervelt, Denver, among others)
In The Los Angeles Times, Judy Rosen reviewed “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” a new book by Bob Dylan: “It’s a bummer, to put it mildly, to find a Nobel laureate — and, more to the point, the writer of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ — mixing metaphors and spouting nonsense like an elderly uncle who bulk-emails links to Fox News segments.” (Mark Flannery, Fullerton, Calif.)
In Slate, Carl Wilson wrote that Dylan’s self-indulgence, “whether poetical or comical, wears as thin as a Hermann Hesse paperback in the rear pocket of an old hippie’s Levi’s.” (Maura Kealey, San Francisco)
In The Arizona Daily Star, Pepper Provenzano mined a political paradox: “The Oath Keepers worship Trump, who never kept an oath in his miserable life.” (Carol Breimeier, Tucson, Ariz.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Dan Neil weighed in on an updated automobile: “The HR-V features Honda’s new Body Stabilizing Seats. It’s too late for me. My contents have shifted.” (Ron Dorn, Boise, Idaho)
In The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott questioned the importance of new assertions that Vermeer didn’t paint a canvas that was previously credited to him: “We love art by adopting it, not by looking for its birth certificate.” (Tovah Rom, Arlington, Va.)
In The Guardian, Jonathan Liew pondered the pessimism of those who root for the Arsenal soccer team: “It is the eternal gift of Arsenal fans to be able to identify the potential anxiety in virtually any situation, however favorable or triumphant. Pleasure is simply misery deferred.” (Parnesh Sharma, North Vancouver, British Columbia)
In The Marketing Insider for MediaPost, Kathy Sheehan marveled at the velocity of change during this chaotic era: “The iPad was a game changer. The pandemic was a game changer. TikTok is a game changer. The incredible speed with which the world moves today often means the game changes before all the pieces can even be put on the board of the last game.” (Mary Beth Smith, Frisco, Texas)
And in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf bemoaned the proliferation of digital menus: “Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I’ll be for heaven if I’m lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist.” (Robert Heinaman, Keswick, England)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Reading (and Watching)
“The Rise of the Republican Apostate,” a superb guest essay in Times Opinion by Andy Kroll, helped me put words to a phenomenon that I’d noticed and been riveted by but hadn’t quite articulated in my head. There is indeed this strong and curious tendency in American life to give more credence to the positions of someone who arrived at them via some purported conversion, some ostensible epiphany, as if a second assessment inherently carries more weight than a first and a change of heart puts you in a truer place than constancy does. I’m all for an open mind and evolving thoughts, but not everyone’s evolution is toward wisdom, as Kroll amply notes. Apostates haven’t necessarily tapped great bravery to discover great honesty. Sometimes their rebellion is a matter of silly romanticism. Sometimes it’s caprice. Sometimes it’s just plain pragmatic.
I have a soft spot for nutty horror movies and can stomach some violence as long as it’s not torture porn. Along those lines, I enjoyed “Barbarian,” which is streaming on HBO Max and may still be in some theaters. There are a few big holes in its impressively loopy plot, which doesn’t tie up everything as neatly as it might. And it ambles some at the start. But it has audacious shifts in tone, location and time period that keep you on your toes. It has a thematic through line — about men’s quickness to dismiss and degrade women, and about the inability of men and women to read each other — that it doesn’t overwork. And it has lead performances by Georgina Campbell and Justin Long that are absolute perfection.
On a Personal Note
Autumn is sneaky. Although I’m always on the lookout for it, always primed for it, it bursts into its ephemeral majesty so quickly that I’m always startled by it, too. A tree that I remember as green from yesterday’s walk is crimson today. A tree that I don’t remember at all has taken up residence on some tantalizing band of the color spectrum between orange and pink. My eyes widen and my heart swells — it’s like falling in love. It has that same seed of sadness, that same prickle of death. The magic can’t last.
I’ve lived in places where there’s little change in seasons, where the mercury moseys slightly upward or subtly downward but the landscape doesn’t refashion itself. There’s an argument for such modesty. It doesn’t demand as varied a wardrobe.
And to have the kind of autumn that I savor here in North Carolina means to be plunged into a winter with just enough cold on the worst days to test your mettle, to denude those trees and turn them skeletal. I have neighbors behind me whose house I can barely make out in July. In January, though, I can almost watch the football games on the big-screen television in their lavishly windowed great room.
But that’s January. This is early November, when the leaves that haven’t yet lost their grip are making a brilliant statement, taking a final bow. Autumn in places that have a real autumn teaches you to live in the moment, to open yourself to the world around you, to pay homage, to pay heed. Fail that lesson and you just might miss the whole spectacle, which can retreat as suddenly and stealthily as it arrives. You’re left with regret. It’s a sorry cousin to remembrance.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram • @FrankBruni • Facebook
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