Convolution Reverb
On inheriting memories of war
Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, a round up of my writing, then some thoughts on my recent work experience, media I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. I’d also love it if you shared this letter with a friend.
If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Tweets about teaching or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common.
CONVOLUTION REVERB*
My Conan the Barbarian story goes as follows. I was born two months pre-term, three days after Christmas, during a war. Given those circumstances, it was only a few days after my birth that my father and my grandparents managed to come and see me. I was a small shriveled up thing with dark hair and tiny hands, kept in a special bed designed to keep me warm, being fed formula by nurses vigilant for air raids. So when my family members did get the all clear to visit me and my mom, and she was a very new mom then, it was sort of a big deal.
My grandfather Branko, however, stayed home instead and watched, and videotaped, Conan the Barbarian. And he was so engrossed in the story, the early fame Schwarzenegger sword-and-sorcery extravaganza, that when air raid warnings kicked in in his neighborhood he didn’t notice. He also didn’t notice the big yellow letters that sprawled across the screen instructing him to immediately run to a bomb shelter, and he didn’t notice when it was all over and the city collectively let out a sigh of relief because no one had been killed.
What my grandfather Branko did notice once the movie was over was that his wife wasn’t home yet so he called the maternity ward where she had presumably gone to visit me and the nurse who picked up the phone, or so I have filled out this detail in the story that has been told to me countless times, informed him of what had just gone down. According to my father, inside the maternity ward, they all did shelter in the basement and they were abruptly separated from me because babies were being taken to a different part of the building during the raid. He is not one to discuss what it all felt like, but since this story kept coming up over and over in random conversations when I was a child, I imagine the experience had left him feeling a lot.
The last time I saw Conan the Barbarian was six or seven years ago, during one hot Illinois summer when my partner and I had just returned from visiting his family in New York and I stayed an extra night at his place, aware of his impending move back East and not willing to let go of a very dreamy June we had been having. We laid prone on his old queen Casper mattress, in front a small laptop screen, shamefully eating stray freezer edamame, vegan sausages and mayo, and trying to out-trivia each other on Conan’s origins. We thought of the film as a late night watching pick because I had recently shared my Conan the Barbarian story. My dad still has the VHS that my grandfather taped that day, the one with the air raid warning letters over top and all, but I imagine watching that version of the film instead of Netflix would have been a very different vibe.
I don’t remember the Croatian Independence War though it significantly marked the first five years of my life. My father was deployed to the front after my mom and I had left the maternity ward and my encounters with him in those early days were sparse - for some part of 1991 and 1992, he was digging trenches instead of building a family. Both of my uncles served as well, one deserting the Yugoslavian army just to immediately be drafted by the Croatian military which had started as just a little more than a militia a year earlier. There were Bosnian refugees in my hometown all my childhood and their kids went to my kindergarten and elementary school. When I was a preteen, conversations among adults were heavy with discussions of PTSD and a few rehabilitation centers for Independence War veterans that suffered from it were rumored to open on the island where my family lived. Around the same time, my father fell mysteriously ill with strong bouts of nausea, headaches and overall feelings of full-body distress that wouldn’t go away unless he paced in circles around our living room for hours or slept on the couch curled into as much of a ball as a grown man can fold himself into. I’m not sure whether any of his doctors ever made the connection, and I was too young to ever eve think about it, but with the hindsight of almost twenty years it is not lost on me that his time in the war must have been a factor in this disease that, as I was always told, no doctor could diagnose. I was a war baby and a post-war preeten, and when I was a teenager the shadow of the war still loomed over the culture enough for boys in my high school classes to try and make themselves look cool by espousing militant anti-Serbian sentiments.
At the same time, most of what I know about the Croatian Independence War comes from anecdotes passed down to me by family and friends that I have stitched together into a somewhat coherent narrative. I was surely supposed to learn about this war in history class during my education in Croatia, but my middle school class ran out of time and barely brushed on the beginning of the conflict and my high school class restarted right in the stone age and I left for the United States before it made its journey through time into the 1990s. Teaching this portion of Croatian history, as well as any portion of history of the former Yugoslavia, was also always controversial and politically charged so I remember pundits critiquing textbooks on TV as much as I remember the few of my teachers’ relevant lectures. In 2004 and 2005 when Croatian generals were being indicted by international courts for what were deemed to be war crimes there were waves of historical revisionism in local media. As a young and voracious but context-agnostic reader of Croatian newspapers, I was very confused. I vividly remember trying to decide whether I needed to perform anger or indignation when the topic came up during Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ house or whether something awful really had been happening while I was a toddler and it was best not to ask about it. In some sense, I was probably bound to always more strongly remember the stories and the anecdotes and the politically distorted newspaper commentary more than some objective history lesson, even had school given me a backbone of flimsy facts to attach them to.
So when war broke out in Ukraine and stories started pouring out of it and into American media, I immediately thought to myself “this is just like our war” - a war that I really do not but also really do remember. A tightly knotted heaviness settled into my chest.
A high school acquaintance who is Ukrainian and lives in Ukraine still has been posting about the war on Instagram and their feed reads like a terrible poetry, a series of letters to either a dear friend or an absolute void that will swallow these letters, letters that drip with grief and anger, whole. The space between the lines fills up with dread, the text seems that much more surreal because it is intentionally distributed in space rather than being just one stream of story, as if the author wants to remind us, the mindless social media doom scrollers that none of what is happening is natural or spontaneous.
On the radio, on NPR and in podcasts, much more than usual reporters lean into rivers of fear and shaky facts and set every report against a background of ominous noises. For the first two weeks or so of the war, The Daily from the New York Times has been doing what seems to be their favorite thing - bringing us foreigners the voices of those in crisis with little more context than an implication that some of these stories are representative of the average Ukrainian experience. Podcast producers on this beat seem to love to tug at their listeners’ heartstrings or to shock them by leveraging the intimacy of the medium, the closeness of the story subject’s voice to the soft skin of your ears or the slow float of their words in your kitchen as you make breakfast.
During elections here in the United States, it drove me wild to think that telling one emotionally resonant story with minimal facts to ground it somehow counted as journalism. With similar reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic, I was irked by the use of someone’s pain, presented in first person, to an end that was not always clear (and a big media conglomerate always has an end beyond just representation). Now, with the war in Ukraine, I am less quick to indict the Daily because my own family has war stories that are meaningful even out of context. I am also more worried because I have seen ripples of emotion emanating from those stories seed generations with fear and hate and a closedness to neighbors that is not always fully warranted.
Wars are about foreign policy and bombs and sanctions and tanks and crumbling bridges and refugees. Wars are also about stories and the war of stories is one that both Russian and Ukrainian leaders are well attuned to. Quasi-historical essays are pitted against bunker videos are pitted against dramatic readings of last text messages are pitted against outlawing stories that tell the truth. Different stories will win out in different places and the people that embrace the different winning stories will lead very different lives and pass on very different emotional and genetic codes to their children.
I rarely think about what it means for me to have been a wartime baby or what it means for my parents, who were 25 and 26 at the time, to have been wartime parents.When I do think about it, I have to wonder whether some of my resilience was hardcoded into my tiny body that day when my grandfather was watching Conan and I was sheltering in a basement with nurses. I also have to wonder whether some of the melancholy that so often refuses to leave my system, a heaviness that is in my bones even when I am at my physically fastest and mentally brightest, first set in during those early months when I was a fragile thing in my mom’s arms, in my grandparents’ apartment, away from my father who was lying in a shallow trench on the front of an active war.
While I was in high school, my family took a literal trip down memory lane and visited a campsite my parents had had a glorious stay at while they were young and on our way back we drove on roads that inched close to where my dad had been stationed during the war. He pointed out places where trucks would drop off soldiers and places where there used to be landmines. We were physically in a place where he had once been a different person, a soldier, and some of that person must have always been in him in those first few years we had spent together. When I was teenager and refused to make my bed or fold my clothes, he’d jokingly point out that I’d never make it in the army with that attitude. I never really laughed, partly because I knew he had made it out of the army alive so the proposition wasn’t just a hypothetical. I don’t have memories of war but so many of my memories are imbued with the war’s bitter aftertaste, with that metallic sting of blood you get when you bite your own tongue as to not speak of something you have observed but not lived.
Ironically, I am writing this from a comfortable vantage point within a global superpower that didn’t necessarily always want me and that is not necessarily devoid of its own bitter-tasting narratives, but that does get to grandstand and cultivate politically advantageous foes while people are dying somewhere far away. And so the story of war in Ukraine really is just a story to me and one that is filtered through a revived narrative about justice and righteousness and good and evil on behalf of politicians that are just like those boys I went to middle school with, the ones that needed anti-Serbian sentiment to buttress their dubious sense of self-importance. Really, many of them are giving Conan, like in that movie that so gripped my grandfather, posturing with his broad shoulders and in-your-face vision of masculinity, than they are coming off as insightful leaders ready to truly help. Their stories ultimately may be the most dangerous of all and I just hope we will not all miss the big yellow letters when they start showing up.
If you want to find some way to help Ukraine, I found this helpful.
Best,
Karmela
* In physics, a reverberation or a reverb refers to a sound persisting for a while after it has been produced. This typically happens when sound is repeatedly reflected from some surface so that it first builds up then dies down with each subsequent reflection. Physically this can be done by using echo chambers of passing the sound through metal while digital sound processing software uses the mathematical function of convolution in order to produce the same effect.
ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
For Scientific American, I wrote about two really interesting quantum physics experiments that dealt with light and time and water and carbon, respectively. The first gets into how when you go very, very small even simple things like water flowing through pipes become very complex. Recently, a team of researchers from the Flatiron Institute in New York and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris had to reach for the full machinery of quantum theory to explain why water flows faster and faster through narrower and narrower tiny tubes made of carbon. It was really engaging to report on this work since it was theoretically creative and complex and yet the implications of understanding nanotubes and water are really practical with possible implications for processes as common and as important as water desalination.
The second story was about something that sounds like it came straight from the pages of a Star Trek companion novel - time crystals! Time crystals are quantum systems with inherent predictably repetitive behavior. It is their most natural state to tick-tick-tick like a clock without ever settling into equilibrium and they were theorized as recently as 2012. One was made with the help of a powerful and intricate quantum computer just last year, and now I am reporting on a team of scientists that has made a much more simple and handy time crystal out of light.
For my graduate alma mater I profiled John Veysey, Illinois Physics alumnus and National Science Board Executive Officer who has had a really fascinating career in science, science communication and science policy, seemingly always at the intersection of multiple complex and important disciplines and issues. It was really intriguing and inspiring to talk to Veysey about his fairly nonlinear career path and what sort of skills and insights each stop along the way to his current, rather influential, position has afforded him.
LISTENING
As companion pieces to this letter: This episode of Imaginary Worlds where Ukrainian speculative fiction authors explain the tensions between their visions of fantasy worlds and science fiction futures and those of their Russian counterparts that predate the currently ongoing war. Also, this episode of NPR’s Throughline on how wars affect generations of people even after they end.
Tara Westover on the Longform podcast, talking about how to write about yourself and your trauma, about expectations of advice or leadership that come after your write something that resonates with more people than you expected, and how to use your feelings in your writing instead of writing from a place of being dissociated from them.
The new Orville Peck record Bronco. It is his slowest, saddest, corniest yet, but I am so in the bag for the sad queer cowboy act that I listened to it on my way to work with as much zeal as I had for his past, more upbeat and campy, records. I still feel the same way as I did last time I wrote about Peck - the traditions and visuals of his music have something of a fraught history, but his reclamation of them as a queer person helps it be about vastness, freedom and finding space to deal with your demons more than anything else.
As with a good number of musical genres that I did not grow up with, I started dabbling in indie rock fairly late and missed out on the phenomenon that Big Thief apparently is. While I haven’t engaged much with their most recent record, I did spend a good part of late February listening to Masterpiece and enjoying how inoffensively vibe-y it is and how pleasant it can sound against the backdrop of a cold but sunny morning. Music is most important to me during my morning walks to school these days and this is another record, similar to Bronco, that just managed to lull me into a sense of calm, albeit at times a wistful calm, on frosty Mondays that were bound to turn to chaos by the end of the school day’s second period.
Blanck Mass’s soundtrack to Ted K, a very well made movie with a very successfully foreboding score. On a related, but more screechy and grating instrumental note: Dreamcrusher’s Incinerator, a cross between Death Grips without vocals and Lighting Bolt with a slightly more industrial bend, not an easy listen, but an energizing one for sure.
LEARNING
It’s midterms season at school again and I am again finding myself both talking a lot and thinking a lot about what grades mean or what grades should mean in a classroom that focuses on knowledge rather than compliance. During my regular teaching days, I am somehow being pulled into more and more conversations about behavioral issues and detention while my own classes are presenting me with just a little more chaos than I am used to more often. I am still rather unconvinced by any arguments that favor punishment and overly hard lines, but I have certainly learned that I have to have very clear policies about what is and what is not acceptable. Similarly, it has become very top of mind for me to very carefully monitor my mood so that my tone of voice does not go against the philosophy that motivates those policies in moments when there is just a little too much noise in the room or a particular student refuses to do a particular thing for what feels like the billionth time. I always think I have learned this lesson and then it reasserts itself again: teaching is very much a discipline of projection and performance and intentional giving, maybe even paying forward, of some part of yourself. My students mean the world to me, but being the adult in the room who has the answers and lays down the foundations for the relationships we have as scholars is still at times really exhausting. I often wonder whether more veteran teachers think about this as much as I do or if they separated their teacher persona from their more easily impacted self a little more. There is certainly a line between giving too much of yourself and being too efficient and too cold, and this spring semester seems to be set up to teach me how to tip-toe on it.
On the writing front, I am working on a few projects that are slightly different in theme and scope than the stories I usually write, and it has been really invigorating and inspiring to push myself and my skills in this way. I have some serious writing news coming up, hopefully soon, and though I seem to always be caught in some cycle of edits and revisions and then more edits and more revisions, I have recently found some more confidence in calling myself a writer which is for sure helping me enter spring with a bit more pep than I’d usually have at the end of an exhausting and dreary winter.
WATCHING
Cameron Esposito talking about pronouns because I feel this way so intensely and so often.
Lots of the Clone Wars animated series which I have found to be more charming and overall successful than most of the Star Wars movies made after 1983. Episodes are quick and easily digestible, stories that vary from brief monster-of-the-week style plots to multi-episode arcs develop a stunning array of characters with a fair amount of emotional depth and resonance, and the whole thing is just fun almost by default. At the same time, watching Clone Wars has certainly changed my perception of Jedi as an institution and raised questions about peacekeeping, colonialism and the stakes of foregoing personal attachments in a much more complex way than my past engagements with this fictional world.
On the TV front we have also been watching Winning Time on HBO, an Adam McKay production focusing on the LA Lakers in the 1980s. Though I know very little about basketball I am generally interested in stories about process and the mechanics of myth-building so the premise of the show, focused on rather vivid characters such as Magic Johnson, Jerry Buss and Jerry West, appeals to me. However, this is a very McKay show so it is flooded with captions, era-appropriate visual fuzziness, 4th wall breaking and other visual ticks that are at times helpful but also get very old very quickly. This is not incredible television, but it is television that is just interesting enough to keep you watching. My partner pointed this out to me after the second episode - we’ll probably talk a lot of trash about this show, but we’ll also keep watching it out of the same sense of emotional inertia that seems to have forced many current TV-makers into chasing true stories that feel just familiar and safe enough to not alienate an audience even when they’re told imperfectly. (Recently, I heard an interesting conversation about this wave of true story television on this episode of The Watch.)
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune returned to streaming so we finally committed the three hours it takes to plunge into this new imagining of the sci-fi classic and came away pretty impressed. I was a fan of the book as a teenager and saw both some of the mini-series adaptations and the ill-fated David Lynch movie so it was exciting to revisit this content, especially as it was wrapped in such glossy packaging. There is not much editorializing to be done here, the whole thing is just very technically strong (and absolutely stunning) and does not dilute the at times dry strangeness of the story one bit. I’m looking forward to part two, if there ends up being one.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is another visually stunning movie that called for a serious investment of our time and also really delivered on aesthetics and big feelings. Based on a set of Haruki Murakami stories (much like Dune, a tie-in to my past as a voracious teenage reader of fiction), it is slow and aching and at times almost disturbing but never quite obscene or off-putting even when very odd, or very shocking, events are revealed. The film is worth watching purely for how Hamaguchi films the titular car driving, but giving the story a chance to sink into you gives so much more. I am seriously considering watching it again, just to catch whatever finesse was lost on me as I probably over-focused on the emotionally charged plot the first time around.
We watched Being John Malkovich as a somewhat impulsive and goofy date night pick and to address what felt like a pop culture blind spot for both of us. This was a more odd and more complex film than I expected, certainly fully soaked in a very late 90s brand of weirdness and at times overly charged with sexuality and gender subtext that did not age all too well. At the same time, the big questions at the bottom of this story, the ones concerning being somebody else or trying to feel like someone who is not yourself are resonant and this film somehow explores them more poignantly and less melodramatically than many later, more serious, pieces. I’m not sure whether I can wholeheartedly recommend Being John Malkovich, but I have thought of it often since we first saw it and certainly think it’s a piece of moviemaking worth earmarking.
Tony Stone’s Ted K was another date night movie that I felt fairly conflicted about. I am pretty firmly of the opinion that popular culture properties that focus on bad actors such as serial killers and terrorists in ways that either glamorize them or offer them an overly understanding lens are too common. At the same time, this treatment of the so-called Unabomber was both gorgeous and powerful. We saw this film on the big screen at IFC in a nearly empty theater and I probably could have watched much more than its two sparsely narrated hours. Scenes of Montana nature that dominate its visuals are filmed really well, the soundtrack is fantastic and the whole thing is slow and systematic in the same way that one can imagine Kaczynski’s, and it bears noting taht he was trained as a mathematician, inner dialogue must have been, at times probably unbearably so. None of the technical prowess of the film could fully distract me from wondering why this piece was made and who for though and the inclusion of an imaginary love interest for Kaczynski definitely made it harder to answer those questions in a way that wouldn’t trouble me. This is unfortunate given how immaculate the execution of the rest of the film is.
READING
A pair of Aeon essays on quantum mechanics and the traps of how we either mystify it or detach it from its more heady implications. Both are complex, but accessible and offer a worthwhile scientific and historical perspective.
This Twitter thread about article titles that everyone who’s never worked with an editor probably needs to scroll through.
Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, a giant book I would have been really excited about as a teenager, but have been having more trouble with now that I have both worked in and written about physics. Penrose’s style is surprisingly dry and he tries to simultaneously use the language of scientific wonder and mystery and pile on the kind of facts you may usually find in a textbook without much success. The early chapters where he establishes the stakes of the work are challenging to get through even though I am rather familiar with what I think he is trying to say and have been known to get roped into similar conversations about big questions concerning the nature of science fairly often. The thing that jumped out at me even more than the inaccessible writing style, however, has been how male and white he sounds, especially as his perspective seems to be informed by Western thought, Greek philosophy and an idealized take on science as the most objective and accurate tool for understanding the world. As a teenager I would have lapped this up because my own view of science was based on exactly this kind of writing which had made me believe that science was monolithic and infallible and completely divorced from the messiness of society. Now that I have more experience with real-time-real-world science, I’ve made something of a hundred and eighty degree turn on this and find Penrose’s writing informative and interesting but also stifling and reductive. As I slowly make my way through the hundreds upon hundreds of pages of this book, I do hope he will manage to surprise me and offer just a touch more of what the world outside the lab and numerous pages of equations is really like.
EATING
Vegan sushi and katsu sandwiches and a strawberry matcha cake at a small dinner party with friends, the kind that I had dreamed about having in a future life while I was in graduate school, before that future came true but with a big pandemic asterisk. I mostly improvised the cake, but I always start with this vanilla cake recipe and then swap and add as I see fit.
Punjabi Deli takeout in Tompkins Square park on the first even remotely sunny Friday afternoon in lieu of a more formal date night. Also: very fancy date night at Wayan, an upscale Indonesian and French cuisine fusion restaurant where it’s mostly side dishes that are vegan and yet I wasn’t mad about it at all.
Vegan pizza on homemade overnight focaccia dough. I understand that this is not canonical in New York where pizza dough is thinner and made with much lower dough hydration, but I have also always been a sucker for a grandma-style slice. My parents always made my brother and me pizzas that looked like this when we wanted something both exciting and comforting.
Big salads with greens, apples and mushrooms from the farmer’s market and avocado toast with many, many accouterments (chili oil and fermented bean curd are serious avocado toast power players) on fantastic sesame sourdough from Shewolf Bakery.