In full bloom with Rita Popova 🌼
Spring has come to San Francisco, and it means it’s time for creating recommendation lists with my dear friend
, who continues to be such a big inspiration for me.Rita is a poet, an aspiring mystic, and an AI tsarina, who develops product strategy for Replika and Blush. Last fall, we created our first seasonal list of reading recommendations, practices, and rituals — it looks like this may become a tradition!
Anya’s list:
Reading Nancy Lemann
I first read Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints during my visit to New Orleans last April, and now I forever associate her prose with spring. Lemann's characters live in 1980s Louisiana, but there are barely any signs of the time that show that. I can only imagine all these corrupt politicians, damsels in distress, and young Southern gentlemen at a garden party in the late April heat, never engaging with the external world of news and modernity.
Lemann published only a few books in the 80s, and then she was mostly forgotten. However, in 2022, The Paris Review commissioned a couple of articles revisiting her best work, including her lesser-known book, Ritz of the Bayou. This book covers State Governor Edwin Edwards's two trials for racketeering in the mid 80s, and I read it this year. As critic James Wolcott accurately points out, reading Lemann feels like watching a pre-mumblecore movie, but I might also add that no mumblecore movie has as much grace and subtle humor:
[Ritz of the Bayou] possesses all the signature traits of her fiction—the rueful humor and wry asides, the sentences that unfurl like scarves from a magician’s sleeve, the damp moss of history underfoot in the present, the faded gallantry of good manners—with a larger probe of social anatomy and institutional drift. […] It’s not only as a work of journalism that the book deserves better than it got and gets. […] As soon as our correspondent takes her first gander at the courtroom, she knows she is where she is destined to be: “My heart was back in business when I saw all that human frailty.” Like the hedonistic governor in the defendant’s chair, she is loath to moralize and scold, musing, “Politics is not the place to look for saints. It’s not exactly the blue vault of heaven there, in politics.”
Decluttering vs. merchandising
If you've spent any time on the internet in the last year or two, you've definitely seen viral restocking videos on TikTok or celebrity house tours with well-organized (and often gigantic) pantries. I believe this represents a new and more insidious trend in housekeeping. If you search for spring cleaning tips this year, you'll find that the new ideal for a well-organized home is not just a clean and clutter-free space organized by Marie Kondo's method, but a fully merchandised and aestheticized vision of opulence where each type of pasta needs to be unboxed, placed in a special jar, and given its own shelf.
One of my favorite Bay Area writers, Kelly Pendergrast, explored this phenomenon and what it says about today's culture in her essay last year for Dilettante Army, and this passage about consumers turning their own homes into an Amazon distribution center stayed with me for months:
In today’s kitchen imaginary, the computer (automated, optimized, futuristic) has been supplanted by the logistics center (networked, outsourced, abstracted). Still, if the kitchen pantry today is a space of logistics, an Amazon distribution center in the heart of the home, it still requires an operator at the center. And that operator is usually a woman, usually coded as a wife. She is needed to manage the inflows and outputs of products, to display and merchandize and decant, to negotiate other household members’ access and use of the space and the food within.
Rediscovering 1920s
In my early teens, I was fascinated by the 1920s — as part of a sewing group, we ambitiously decided to create a collection of flapper-inspired dresses for our final project. Despite our enthusiasm, our skills were not sufficient to sew all the chartreuse and mustard yellow dresses with drop waists and pleated skirts that we envisioned, which led to some real resentment.
Over fifteen years have passed, and this spring, I'm returning to rediscover my old obsession. I’ve been seeing headlines about "jazz age" makeup and the 20s inspiring interior designers. To remind myself of all the things I loved about the 1920s, I read Flappers by Judith Machrell. The author tells the stories of the the Josephine Baker, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, Tamara de Lempicka and Zelda Fitzgerald. This book dives deep not just into the 1920s aesthetic but also the politics of the time and the way all these heroines responded to the first success of the women’s liberation movement.
A fitting companion to this book is a recent episode of Lost Ladies of Lit dedicated to Zelda Fitzgerald and her novel 'Save Me the Waltz' — largely autobiographical narrative about a woman striving to start a new season of her life by dedicating herself to ballet.
Exploring scents
I wrote about scents (and pairing them with books you're reading) last fall, and now I've fully delved into the fragrance rabbit hole. This new hobby is especially fun in the spring when so many plants are in bloom. If you're lucky, you may be able to verify some of the obscure claims that perfume bloggers make—for example, find irises and see for yourself if they really smell like carrots.
These past few months, I've been seeing a lot of great projects for those who are getting into perfumes as a hobby. The Dirt, a daily newsletter about entertainment, launched Scent Access Memory in collaboration with Are.na to highlight the best writing about fragrance. Meanwhile, NYT published a lengthy profile of Hilde Soliani, an Italian perfumer known for her inventive gourmands (i.e., food-inspired scents). I highly recommend checking out her website—the brand's style is all about joy and almost childlike simplicity:
Soliani’s reputation among fragheads — their word, not mine — is as an outsider artist, or what used to be called as such. Her packaging is unpolished, the range of her scents is feral and her website’s design screams “credit-card fraud risk.” Most important, she is unconcerned with coherence. Coherence is for brands, not artists.
On my journey to learn about the subject, I also read Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent by the Berkeley-based perfumer Mandy Aftel. In her book, she describes the way sourcing of natural ingredients and its use in perfumery is tied to colonialism, magic rituals, and class relations. She also writes about the way our knowledge about materials can transform our interactions with perfumed products into a richer experience:
Fragrance, striking us as simultaneously timeless (in its evocation of memory) and evanescent (in its fleeting beauty), gives us the opportunity to marvel at our precious life and the magnificence of nature even as the experience is tinged with sadness. […] And while it lasts, it invites the imagination to embark on a dynamic reverie, creating an internal unfolding-a kind of dream composed of successive images, thoughts, and feelings — that parallels the unfolding of the perfume itself.
Rita’s list:
Volcanoes
After a destructive fall/winter season, when things were breaking down on both personal and planetary scales, I became a little obsessed with volcanoes.
It began in January, when I had the good luck of visiting the Kīlauea volcano on the island of Hawaiʻi. We were driving through the beautiful black lava fields, some barren, some populated with neon green plant life and baby goats—it was easy to feel that I was on some of the newest Earth on Earth (400 thousand years old = a geological newborn) and some of the most fertile, porous and rich in minerals. The cycles of destruction and regeneration were made so obvious there, it inspired me to develop a personal volcanology—tune into what shifts, what rises to the surface, what is violently destroyed and what could grow from it.
Then, I watched this movie Fire of Love, about Katia and Maurice Krafft, a couple of volcanologists in love. I was on a plane, coming back from a very seismic trip abroa—I saw my family for the first time in 5 years—and the beautiful imagery that the Kraffts have captured has seized my imagination. It’s a short, beautiful, and intense love story.
Finally, to submerge all senses in volcanic activity, I recommend getting a sample of Kīlauea by Olympic Orchids—for me, it smells like ferns growing around a lava cave.
Watching Tennis
I am happy to report that I am back to watching tennis this year. Here are 3 reasons why:
#1. It’s just a really beautiful, meditative, trance-inducing sport. It’s played in silence, which amplifies the feeling that it’s played on the edge of an abyss; it has a distinct pace—the matches can be pretty long and sometimes boring, but then suddenly very intense, and you can be as distracted or as focused as you wish.
#2. Tennis is all about a) the attitude and b) the momentum, and I am very interested in a) having the right attitude and b) seizing the momentum. A good book to read on the subject is Inner Game of Tennis, which I am hoping to master, even though I don’t really play tennis (yet).
#3. Well, the balls. It’s an obsession that my dog and I share. The tennis ball is the perfect object; perfect color, perfect weight, perfect sound. I really want to write a book about tennis balls, but I never will, because the perfect book about tennis balls already exists—Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue. I can’t recommend it enough.
Nourished by Time
Around the same time as the volcanoes I discovered Nourished by Time, a project by the Baltimore prodigy (and former tennis instructor!) Marcus Brown. Marcus Brown is a STAR, like the real deal, and Erotic Probiotic 2 is a perfect album. I prescribe it to anyone who suffers from bouts of depression, anxiety, insecurity, despair, loneliness, or weakness of faith. Not convinced? Watch this video. The new EP, Catching Chickens, is also fantastic.
ADDITIONAL MUSIC RECOMMENDATION: The Mystery of the Third Planet
This was my favorite cartoon growing up, and I was happy to discover that the soundtrack is even better than I remembered. In my opinion, it pairs well with Long Season by Fishmans. (Which pairs well with Fishmans the film. What a great film. It’s 3 hours and there’s a lot of footage of people revisiting places of their youth and saying “It’s exactly like it was” or “It’s nothing like it was”).
Plant Intelligence
General Ecology: With Plants, the Serpentine podcast (via Dages Juvelier Keates)
The most interesting part of this podcast episode for me was in the beginning, a segment with the writer Elvia Wilk. She mentions a sci-fi story where aliens have come to Earth but their sense of time was so much quicker than human time, they thought that humans were not sentient and basically killed them all (…or something). But there are also recordings of what plant DNA sounds like, a segment about the fascinating history of the Great Palm, and so much more to get you inspired.
What better time than spring to rediscover the plant intelligence within yourself? To unfurl from the seed towards the sun, from the volcanic soil that has been left in the immediate aftermath of destruction and in anticipation of more destruction to come (as per CD Wright’s intro to Spring and All). Speaking of…
Spring and All by William Carlos Williams
This book just turned 100 years old but it feels so fresh and urgent. I re-read it every spring, or every time I feel desperate in general. Like many other miracles, I discovered this book thanks to Ariana Reines. William Carlos Williams, too, is the real deal, and what he talks about in the book is the imagination, the force that I feel has been often misused and misunderstood, but is still sorely needed. Here’s a quote: “To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force—the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and see.”
💕