Week of September 27, 2009

G-minor Scale
Kreutzer No. 7
B-minor Partita:  Corrente

I have been reading Julie Powell's book, Julie and Julia, in which she chronicles her year of cooking and blogging about all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  The  book is not as good as the movie, unfortunately, nor is it as good as the blog itself.  It must be hard to turn a blog into a book.  The ideas were fresh in the blog, and they probably just aren't as good the second time around.

Julie Powell seems like a more likeable person in the movie.  In the book, she is often quite caustic, and that turns me off.  I'm not giving up on her yet, though. 

Her cooking/blogging endeavor inspired this blog.  I'm not spending nearly as much time on the Bach Season as Julie Powell did on the Julie/Julia Project.  But I'm not giving up.  If I hadn't practiced today, I might have given up.  But I did practice. 

One thing I've learned about Julie Powell from reading her book is that she went to New York hoping to become not a writer, as the movie implies, but an actress.  The movie and the back cover of the book imply that Julie Powell is living happily ever after as a writer.  But will she?  What will she write next?  Will it be as popular as her first book? 

I am an aspiring writer, at the moment, but I also aspire to be well-rounded and do lots of different things that I love.  I say that I want to play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and the Ciaccona from the Bach D-minor Partita in my lifetime.  Those are two of the hardest pieces in the violin repertoire.  So I know I have to practice.  Even for someone who does practice, those are lofty goals.  For someone who took years away from the violin, they border on delusional!  So I am writing this blog in order to get back to practicing and to try to accomplish something with my violin playing.

Plus, if I have children, my practice time will all but disappear.  Though life is long, it's not as full of free time as I might imagine it to be.  I think I should get in my practicing while I can.