I'm reading this great book. When I say great what I really mean is insane. The book is titled Julie & Julia, and is about Julie, a 29 year old semi-neurotic New Yorker who decides to cook all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (by Julia Child), in one calendar year. Get it? Julie and Julia...harhar. Then there's all this stuff about her biological clock, her crappy apartment, her crappy job, ect ect. She thinks that cooking all 524 recipes in this book will fix all that is wrong with her life. The thing is that she's not really a good cook to begin with, blah blah blah. It sounds like sort of a chick read, and it probably is. I usually only go for chick movies, but the allure of this cooky cooking woman hooked me from the start. Oh yeah, plus it's a true story, which makes it way more legitimate.
Anyway, to make a long story short, there's this great line in the book:
"The diagrams in MtAoFC (Mastering the Art of French Cooking) are always exciting. You can pretend you're mastering something really daunting, like lithography, or cold fusion or something."
Apparently lithography is of equal difficulty to cold fusion! Which is amazing, because what is cold fusion really? Something nuclear, but well beyond my understanding. I don't know, but I can print you a mighty fine lithograph, and talk all day about the delicate balance of grease and water, so does that mean that I can also "do" cold fusion? It sounds dangerous. I enjoy the fact that this author #1: knows what lithography is, and #2: understands how crazy difficult it is, and #3: has given it a shout out in her book, because all printmakers like to see, in verified type, how difficult printmaking is - as if it makes what we do more valid. Because it does. It really, really does.
What's even better is that I just found out, via the World Wide Web navigation system, that this book will be a movie come April 2009. You know, I am really glad that they make all these great books into movies, because why would people want to sit around and read the printed word all day when they could just watch it at the talkies? Also, for your enjoyment, Meryl Streep will be playing the role of Julia Child. the end.
