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A Tiny Swan Song for Doris Lessing, 94
Doris Lessing died this morning at such a good, old age that I can hardly complain about her departure. But she did go just as I’d just been thinking about how much she’d given us and how little we’d noticed it lately. She said many wonderful, incisive things that opened our eyes, minds, 
hearts and crystallized a lot of realities with which we’d only been murkily familiar. The quote I always kept taped somewhere near me was this: “A simple grateful thought turned heavenward is the most perfect prayer.”
Hot French Film, Wintry Climes, and Soup
In my house, November is soup month. I have it at least once a day and often twice. On Sunday I ate it for breakfast and dinner (Saltie’s mulligatawny and my miso-dumpling, respectively). On Monday I ate it for lunch and dinner (Fairway’s chicken matzoh ball, both times). On Tuesday, a friend and I ate fish stew and oyster bisque codependently at Chelsea Market’s Cull & Pistol.
The weather is not even that bad yet—temperatures are mostly in the 30s and 40s—but New York buildings have yet to adequately kick in their central heating. And since a wintry clime always creeps up with all the insidiousness of an unwanted neighbor, none of us have had a chance to develop our thick skins, figuratively or literally. Hence: soup, the Earth Mommy of all prepared foods.
Today I bundled up in a big fur hat, two mufflers, fingerless gloves, cashmere tights, and 19th century-style clog boots, and bustled into the city to screen Mauvais Sang at Film Forum. A 1986 Leos Carax neo-New Wave movie set, punnily enough, during a French heat wave, it stars Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche, and Denis Lavant. This is what it entails: pantomimed fisticuffs and ventriloquized flirtation, silent stares and empty declarations, steamy nights and boiling pavement, teary tough guys and blank beautiful women, dangling cigarettes and smeary lipstick, snow-white and rose-red (not to mention black and blue), and—oh! oh!—David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” In short, it is a sweat lodge of a film, just what the doctor ordered. To collect myself afterward, I ducked into a West Village ramen bar and slurped an enormous bowl of noodles and broth and pickled eggs and cabbage and bamboo shoots and chunks of pork.
I never once took off my big fur hat, let alone my two mufflers.
Tonight I am preparing a split pea soup with a ham hock. In my witchy cauldron I will toss every root and green vegetable in my larder, including a frond of fennel, and I will listen to an audiobook of Chekhov short stories as I do so. Really, I’m doing the best I can, especially given that I resent any weather that demands so much of my attention. Who knows? I eventually may plaster a grin back on my puss, if not on Lady Garbo’s.
Mauvais Sang screens at Film Forum November 29-December 5. It’s sure to warm you up.