Gentry
"Perspectives"
January 2006 |
Don't Believe the Hype
Shock Culture.
Gentry's Christine VanDeVelde takes a look at a much touted recent book
and questions a toxic combination of MTV, profanity, and poor judgment
Late last fall, I received a review copy of the book, Julie & Julia:
365 Days, 524Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Originally a blog on
web site Salon, the publisher's materials promised the true tale of
Julie Powell, a temp secretary who lives with her husband, three cats, a
dog, and a python above a diner in Queens. She decides to turn her life
around by spending a year cooking every recipe -- all 524 of them -- from
Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The reviewer
from Time, Lev Grossman, called the author "a genuinely gifted
thinker and writer about food." I couldn't wait to start reading about
foie gras and souffles.
By page 50, I was wondering what book Lev had read.
Potage parmentier, eggs poached in red wine, filet,
poulet and crème brulee were barely mentioned, while the reader
was treated to a profanity-laced account of the author's discovery of her
father's copy of Joy of Sex, her teenage sexual yearnings, and her
struggles with infertility, including the sale of her own eggs in order to
pay off credit card debt. Instead of a treatise on butter, vermouth and
Child's totemic classic, Julie and Julia, it turns out, is the
poster child for two of today's most widespread assaults on civility --
vulgar, slovenly language and the predilection for providing way too much
information about one's self. Julia Child, the Smith-educated wife of a
career diplomat, must be rolling in her grave.
When it comes to profanity, I'm not easily shocked.
I've worked in newsrooms, where profanity is as popular as it is in
prisons. But the way it's used today, especially in books and
entertainment, aside from being startling and offensive, connotes laziness
on the part of the writer or speaker. They can't be bothered to come up
with depictive language when an expletive will do. Maybe this is what
happens when the dumbing-down of American education meets up with MTV and
potty-mouthed pop culture. But profanity is simply not adequate to
describe daube de boeuf or sauce aux framboises or the Great
Barrier reef or Kill Bill. I challenge you to think of any
experience that is more appropriately described with an obscenity instead
of a well-drawn phrase.
And what has happened to modesty, discretion,
privacy? Remember decorum? All appearances to the contrary, telling all is
neither charming nor beneficial. Quite frankly, I'd be embarrassed to
recount here some of the things divulged by the author of Julie & Julia.
Newsstand sales of tabloids attest to the national appetite for intimate
details of others' lives. So I suppose the thinking is that if we're
interested in Paris Hilton's sex life, we must be interested in author
Julie Powell's, as well. But too much information, as my fifteen-year-old
calls it, doesn't take the listener -- or the reader -- into consideration
-- a cardinal rule of social intercourse. I'm sure there's a place
somewhere for a discussion of your relatives who are in jail or bodily
fluids, but it's not at the dinner table -- or in a cooking memoir.
It's that time of year when people think of making
New Year's resolutions. Of course, behavior -- whether it's smoking or
swearing or talking too much -- is notoriously difficult to change and
change usually occurs only when one is really ready. That time is unlikely
to arrive on cue on the second of January. Nevertheless, the beginning of
a new year is a good time for resolving to clean up one's act -- something
I'd recommend for any of us and to Julie Powell.
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