Strange Metal
June is Pride month and I am historically not great at being proud. Or reflecting on drawing power from queerness as the world keeps burning.
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This letter uses the word “queer”, a few small swears, and it contains a quote that includes an account of a homophobic slur being used.
Since it’s Pride month and black lives still (always) matter please consider donating to the Marsha P. Johnson Institute that provides support for black transgender people. It is named after one of the most prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969 that gave rise to modern Pride celebrations.
STRANGE METAL*
This letter is coming to your inbox later than usual because I spent most of last week (and weekend) attending the Access Network Assembly conference. It was held over Zoom and I called in from my in-law’s basement, dressed as if we could all be in a room together, full makeup on a Saturday morning and all. This is the second Assembly I helped organized and my first foray into the world of planning complex digital events. When the last session, a debrief with the rest of the organizing team, wrapped up I was happy to take off my headphones, wash my face and venture into the Brooklyn heat for my eight-mile run (Sunday is my “long day”).
I do a lot of thinking as I run, sometimes letting my legs take charge when the trail is familiar and processing whatever floats into my mind while trying to keep my breath steady. The Assembly left me with more thoughts and half-baked revelations than eight miles of sweating-it-out can support. I have a hard time running inside because the scenery contributes to the experience so much for me. I’ve probably just seen to many joggers in too many TV shows and movies, but making it up a small hill or turning a corner and confronting a view of the water always feels a bit like being a heroine of some story, just about to realize something important or stumble upon something life-changing. My running up hills or beating my previous running record or getting those much-wanted negative splits often feels like the embodied version of whatever I-am-the-hero-of-this-story narrative I am internally trying to parse.
For the past two years, the conference has included a session aimed at providing guidelines for questioning and analyzing narratives we construct or encounter in our daily lives**. In person, it was a large group exercise in identifying what goes into stories we tell ourselves about our professional communities as young scientists. In Zoom breakout rooms, the discussion was more personal and subjective, many of us grappling with what it is that informs the stories we tell ourselves about how we got where we are right now.
The structure of the workshop is simple. First, you write down a list of communities or cultures you overlap with. You divide them into labels based on your profession, based on heritage and geography and the ones you have chosen. Then, you try to write a narrative about each community and compare and contrast with the narrative you would write about yourself.
Here’s my list:
Professional: physicist, writer, organizer, advocate, academic
Inherited: Croatian, Eastern European, (raised) Catholic, white
Chosen: queer, vegan, immigrant, runner, yogi
During the workshop, I tried to remember last year’s version and vaguely recalled discussions on how the physics community may tell its own history and how those from the outside may perceive it differently. The session moderator brought us to that place again later in this year’s discussion, prompting a rich conversation on the distinction between being a person that does physics-the-natural-science and being a person that thinks of themselves as a physicist-and-objective-natural-scientist. I appreciate the Access Network in part because it centers these conversations. They complicate ideas we have about what authentic science means and how much scientists can remove their own authentic, real-life, political selves from the process of science. In one of the other workshops, someone vocalized this by wondering out loud whether in academic spaces we can ever escape having to fragment ourselves. Looking at my list of fragments, I was hoping to see something that would glue it all back together again.
I got involved with the Access Network because I got involved with a mentoring program at my university and I got involved with that program because I wanted to be a positive presence for young female physicists. As an undergraduate I was terrified of almost exclusively male graduate students so signing up to be a mentor seemed like a way to not repeat the past. Now, five years later, I noticed that ‘female” or “woman” did not appear on my list. However, “queer” did, and it beat all the other labels in the “chosen” category. I wrote it down very quickly, on a yellow legal pad I had re-appropriated from my cishet husband’s note-taking needs, and though I do not think being queer is really a choice, it felt like one of the more powerful words I could use about myself intentionally.
****
One summer night, lying in bed with her, she said out of the blue, “I respect your sexuality,” referring to the fact that I should be classified as bisexual. Bisexual. Bi. It was a word I hated. That felt somehow both reductive and accusatory. But it was incredibly sweet of her to honor my multitudes. Then her face crinkled into laughter:” Even if society doesn’t!”
Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist
***
I rarely call myself bisexual or pansexual. Though that level of specificity is what occasionally does move fraught or confused conversations forward, even in those instances there’s a discomfort associated with having to go there. Like Miller, I have come to be suspicious of the former and the latter seems to have gotten the same treatment in society just at a later date. The implications of the “bi” vs. “pan” distinctions further complicate things, and those conversations can get very messy depending on personal experiences of whoever is part of the conversation.
Having never really come out in any splashy way and having married a person of a different gender after a long, stable and loving relationship, I’ve also always worried that I would be dismissed as being confused, unrealistic or as having an overly active imagination. Last winter, at a dinner with friends and friends-of-friends, as we were trying to decide on what sort of Indian pickle we all wanted to share, someone critiqued a famous comedian by saying “she said she was bisexual, but everyone knows she has a husband, and she didn’t provide any examples”. My stomach turned, not because I was hungry, but because I say I am bisexual, I have a husband, and I did not come to dinner with a list of examples that would prove my queer credentials. I did say something about it to the acquaintance that started it all, but the whole table laughed as if I was trying to make a joke. In my mind, a cartoonish scenario briefly formed where the acquaintance goes down a list, picks up a phone and says “Hey, hi, can you tell me your gender and whether you ever fucked Karmela.” Bisexual the word makes me nervous. If all people inside the LGBTQIA+ umbrella live on some or other margin, it feels as if bisexuals live in between those margins and that middle makes for a fairly precarious geometry.
***
Being queer and accepting that label for myself is about survival. It’s about the power we get when words are ascribed to us out of our own choice. When the correct term finds its way to you, it’s liberating, like a big sigh of relief. It reminds you that even your strangeness has a function.
Fariha Roisin, How I Learned to Accept My Queerness as a Muslim Woman
***
Queer feels different. Though I understand that it is a reclaimed slur and therefore not for everyone and not everyone’s, its fuzzy edges and its rebellious misfit framing make it feel more optimistic. There is an implication of future in queer because queering is about challenging and changing structures. There is an implication of power to queer because queer sexualities, queer genders and queer families build their own definitions, make their own terms and tell their own stories even when they are put down by structures they are trying to challenge. Of all the labels on my list, it was the one word that felt like it could be aspirational, like it could be pivotal and like it could be powerful. Of course, I do not believe that not being straight is a choice, but I do think that choosing words to describe our preferences and self-image is important. And, in some way, I believe that this is part of the workshop’s takeaway: the words we use to tell our story, the frame we pick for our narrative can be a choice and that choice can make all the difference.
To an extent, my affinity for the word certainly also connects to my need to fuse all the pieces that shape my story together without any sharp edges showing. It’s easy to recast a lot of my childhood. I was always a tomboy, I got interested in dating men late, I wanted to watch sports and fix machines with my dad, and when I got into fashion and make-up it was always a performance more than a reflection of something essential about me. And the frame feels like it still fits. I still want to be physically strong, I wear my hair short like I did when I was six, I still have a standard face of make-up that is more like a drag persona I need to make it through teaching and parties than anything else. On the surface of it, none of this necessarily follows from the way I feel when an attractive person, of whichever gender, crosses my path, but it does all combine to a feeling of a difference and a challenge that I’ve seen reflected in all of my queer friends and acquaintances. Knowing that your preferences are taboo informs the culture you build for yourself and around yourself. Naming it codifies into something complex, replicable and real.
***
There is something about the sounds though. “[Protestors] have walked, marched, and stomped through streets, on sidewalks, parks, churches, filling malls and transportation hubs with their bodies as testimony,” writes Vanessa K. Valdés. “They have repossessed and redefined spaces once thought of as simply neutral, transparent space...revealing the fault-lines of difference based on class, race, gender, and sexuality in this society. They have done so manipulating sound, both recycling chants used through the decades to protest injustice and, at times, simply occupying space, without a word uttered.”
It is Pride Month and so I am thinking about another riot, and about Sylvia and Marsha P. I am thinking of the sounds at Stonewall that night in 1969, about the crescendo of breaking glass after the first brick was thrown, about the chants of “Gay Power!” ringing through the night, about the whack of police batons on sequined fabric and tender legs, about the cops hissing “faggots.” Maybe somewhere someone was setting off fireworks.
Raechel Anne Jolie, Explosions in the Sky
***
June is Pride month and I am historically not great at being proud. I’ve been to one small parade, I’ve made some careful Facebook posts, I’ve commiserated privately with others who also feel like pride, in the way in which it is often shown in predominant narratives, is difficult and scary. This year, many are saying that we need to remember that all the parades and celebrations and business pasting rainbows on every single thing came out of a riot.
I didn’t grow up with much queer culture available to me nor have my professional choices made it easy for me to have queer role models. Who are my queer elders? I’m not sure. I learned most of the “discourse” from Tumblr while I was in college and dating a man who liked to flaunt my sexuality as an add-on to his conquest of me as an extravagant commodity. Maybe the folks who posted on their blogs about how it was okay to feel weird about that dynamic taught me more than any thinkpiece I read since. I think Janelle Monae is a bit of a queer fairy godmother to me, but I am also a little in love with her. As with so much about realizing that you are not the only one and that other people are having the same thoughts and doubts, there seems to be a hidden world of opportunities and choices. I can choose to learn about the riots, I can choose to build them into the narrative I want to be a part of. In this sense, I want to add queer to my “inherited” category and say that realizing I sometimes liked girls opened the door for me to also realize that there are so many rules we can all fight together.
Unlike Roisin, I am white and European, and I grew up Catholic so my experience of making peace with who I am is bound to be so different in so many ways. And the “Learned” in the title of her essay would certainly be “Learning” were I to write that particular narrative for myself. The notion of power, and of being liberated, however, not only resonate but feels so apt to this moment. If you rely on most newspapers for your narratives these days, a lot of what the past few weeks seem to have been about is riots. Once riots died down, the story became less interesting and some other narrative took over, informed by some other set of labels and some other community of interest. It felt wrong both times. It’s not just about riots. It’s about pride, about challenging structures, and finding power in who you are even when you are being put down. That is the motivation I have seen in crowds on TV screens and on the streets. It feels like a much truer Pride month than any parade float ever could be.
Best,
Karmela
Photo: Progress Pride flag designed by Daniel Quasar. Colors added to the traditional Pride flag stand for transgender people, people of color and people lost to HIV/AIDS.
* A strange metal is a fermionic system that breaks down the rules of being a Fermi liquid. Most metals behave as Fermi liquids at sufficiently low temperatures. The theory of their behavior is well understood and has been so since the late 1950s. Though interactions between fermions (an electron is a fermion, for instance) complicate the theoretical understanding of Fermi liquids, one can typically use the idea of a quasiparticle i.e. an excitation that sort of looks like an electron or a proton and that emerges in these interacting systems. Strange metals defy this intuition and no particle-like excitations can be used to think of them as a general rule. Often, much stranger ways for thinking about these systems are necessary. For instance, in a type of strange metal called a Luttinger liquid, electron’s spin and charge behave as if they were completely separate (though we start analyzing the system by assuming that each electron carries both).
** The two workshops I attended were designed and led by Ryan Bailey-Crandell from The Ohio State University and inspired by research done by Prof. Nic Flores, currently at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING The fifth, virtual Access Assembly that started on June 18th and ended the following Sunday after four full days of workshops, panels and discussions was a product of over three months of careful planning and designing by a team of students from nine universities across the country. Along with two other Access veterans, I mentored the team and shared responsibility for a lot of what happened behind the scenes – figuring out Zoom logistics, sending out a myriad of emails, securing accessibility services, setting up the website and so much more. Though I had been part of the team last year when my university hosted the Assembly and worked very hard on making it happen then, this new leadership role certainly taught me to a lot. Unlike many physics conferences, the Assembly centers people rather than science and most programming is aimed at giving students and young faculty tools for becoming advocates or organizers. Conversations get abstract and heavy quickly and the experience is as exhausting as it is rewarding, even when you’re not staring at a screen for hours every day. In other words, being responsible for creating accessible and safe yet productive and challenging spaces is rather non-trivial as is supporting a team of very diverse folks with very different experience levels as organizers, moderators and presenters. As I have written above, I always need a lot of processing time after the Assembly, but this year in particular I am also trying to be conscious of all the skills I gained as a project manager, facilitator and mentor, and the contentment and confidence I should draw from them. Throughout, I kept encouraging student organizers to take pride in putting together a national virtual conference, and now it’s maybe the time for me to take my own advice as well.
In-between Assembly planning and actually attending and running it, I did manage to do some physics and some writing. My inbox has seen a lot of emails chronicling my collaborators’ activities, so I have been confronted with some new idea or new calculation most days this past week. I have been trying to take them in stride even when our household offered ample distractions. I was multiplying some transfer matrices while gingerly debating current day politics with my mother-in-law and outlining one last section of a paper on an experimental collaboration while making plans to possibly leave New York for a few days and see some relatives as safely as we can. And though most of my article pitches have been turned down in the past two weeks or so, I do have one writing project that got the green light and will hopefully take off soon. I feel really silly and impostor-y trying to email editors with pitches and that whole shebang, but as with publishing academic papers, if I want to take myself seriously as a writer I know I just have to try and then keep trying some more.
I am also still applying and interviewing for various jobs and I am counting my lucky stars to have not had any of my immigration paperwork complicated any further by what seems to be a legal landscape that changes terrifyingly fast. I am scared of being unemployed in August, but I would be even more scared if I thought the law would further render me unemployable.
READING Fariha Roisin’s newsletter has been a really inspiring and educational call to action lately. Most recently, she writes
“what I love about abolition is that it relies on hope. It relies on the betterment of us as a species. Every abolitionist from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to Angela Davis, to Mariame Kaba has said so. We need to rely on dreaming. Pessimism is so often masked in the language of rationale, nihilism too. But I know everyone who thinks of the future, relies on hope. It’s as Arundhati Roy says, “Another world is not only possible she's on the way and on a quiet day if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe.””
And in a previous letter
“I don’t care if you think it’s impossible, and I’m frankly tired of people who don’t do anything and their nihilism. I don’t want to hear about the impossibility of a better world, especially if you’re not actively participating in making it so.”
I want to meld this sentiment straight into my DNA.
I finished reading Why Fish Don’t Exist and thought it went on for just a little too long and got just a little too repetitive in trying to emphasize a cautiously uplifting message. I was touched by Miller’s personal story, and do think that learning to lean into chaos sometimes is the healthiest thing to do. However, mixing a roundabout story about a eugenicist with a few final chapters that really center queer love left me with a weird self-help-y, so-crazy-a-mix-that-it-just-might-work feeling. Regardless of my personal take, the chapters on how much eugenics and eugenicist ideas are still present in science (for instance, laws that allow involuntary sterilization) should be required reading in science classes as Miller’s reporting is excellent and the facts and stories she recounts absolutely terrifying and heartbreaking. Anyone who thinks science is apolitical or that issues of race and similarly arbitrary classifications of human beings do not intersect with how we do science today (or how we let it intersect with policy) should certainly read up on these issues, maybe starting with a book as accessible as Miller’s is.
This very sweet comic about cake, protests and taking care of yourself while doing hard work of social change from Alex Testere’s newsletter.
LISTENING This episode of Radiolab on the liberation of RNA, racial profiling and excessive police force, and discovering that a famous bigot is part of your academic family tree. This episode of Slate’s Outward on how navigating and negotiating queer relationships has made some queer folks better equipped for managing various relationship adjustments necessitated by the pandemic. Karina Longworth talking about making You Must Remember This and hating being a newspaper movie critic on The Big Picture.
Lots of Aretha Franklin and Janelle Monae while I’m running. My father-in-law playing harmonica over his favorite blues records on his days off from hospital work on the front lines of the pandemic. Indistinct news chatter from the family TV that triggers my anxiety even when I don’t make out all the words.
WATCHING We finished watching Dead to Me and I realized that my expectation of a funny show with occasional crime and some hard-hitting emotional moments was incorrect. As the show goes into its second season, it is overrun by those moments and though it does celebrate female love and friendship in a pretty unprecedentedly strong way, it also features no small amount of female pain. The two leads continue to excel, and the story truly centers on how bad decisions and lack of support and communication can combine to create a never-ending cycle of hurt. This was a much tougher watch than I expected. At times I wondered whether the creators were trying to make three shows at once: a really sad drama about loss and abuse, a really funny yet heartwarming sitcom about female love, and a straight up soap opera where there is some serious shark-jumping every few episodes. I’m glad this show, and its mixed approach found a place on Netflix, but I’m not sure whether I’d really want to spend another season in its world.
I felt similarly about Barry on HBO, another comedy that is secretly a drama and mixes funny and deeply tragic within the half hour episode format. There are some amazing moments of satire in Barry and almost every time Sarah Goldberg gets more than a few minutes to speak, greatness and poignancy are guaranteed. The show’s second season was better than the first and I definitely wanted more. This is definitely a statement concerning the quality of the show as season two’s finale ended with some serious moral downfalls for many of the show’s central characters. The direction of this series also deserves a separate mention as most of the second half of the second season feels veritably Lynchian and the artistic choices in the production fully surpass what I expected from something billed as an essentially edgy HBO comedy.
Since my partner emerged from dissertation writing induced isolation this past week, we managed to watch a lot more movies than usual. We watched the HBO Andre the Giant documentary and three A24 movies: High Life, First Reformed and The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
I have no personal connection to professional wrestling, so the documentary showed a fairly new world to me, only really hinted at when I tried to read and listen to content about the making of the show GLOW. I am, however, interested in how people are built into myths and who profits off of those myths when they are broadcast on television. This documentary engages the first point, but not the second, giving something of a pass to Vince McMahon, CEO of WWE, who clearly seems to have benefited from Andre’s health issues and pain. This is a tragic story told in a fairly straight forward way, featuring some amusing talking heads, but not necessarily complicating the conversation around professions such as wrestling (where it doesn’t seem like worker’s rights are quite a thing) any more than it needs to.
High Life was something of a disappointment. Though it is visually really stunning and features some really strong performances, notably from Robert Pattison, it just didn’t come together for me. The themes High Life tries to address are difficult and meaningful – it’s about death row inmates being used for fertility experiments in space, on the way to a black hole whose energy they are supposedly going to try and harness. This is a lot as a premise and becomes even more as the story unravels. The film features a lot of sexual and medical violence, steadily driving towards the point that people are really sometimes just animals (especially when they are also treated as such). It was at times hard to watch. Most of the time though, it was frustrating since the cutting of various time jumps, and stories just seemed really sharp. Knowing that this was a film made by a renowned filmmaker, Claire Denis, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that this film was just a few experimental shorts stitched together. The ending certainly didn’t dispel that feeling either, and it came off as rather incongruous.
While First Reformed had a little of the same what-the-fuck-ness to it, and was paced similarly slowly, I liked it much more. The concern for the Earth and ecologically driven despair really resonated, as did the religious imagery. First Reformed is subtle (for instance in naming its characters after the virgin Mary and archangel Michael, and giving us a glimpse into a church run as a business without spelling it all out) until it really isn’t. it takes one somewhat obvious violent turn followed by a less obvious one, but the slow and steady discomfort that build throughout make both seem if not logical then at least reasonable. Most shockingly, the film ends with a possibly positive note, delivering two fairly surreal, almost twee, scenes in its latter half. I’m not sure I can put my finger on what exactly was meant to be happening here, but it turned on some part of my brain that is still trying to disentangle it all, and I do want that from movies.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco was my favorite among the three and the one that I was most engrossed in while watching. Partly this is because it is both very beautifully shot and very dynamic. Not that much happens really, but the characters move a lot and the camera seamlessly follows them down the street and into a beloved, sprawling house. This film is about gentrification, but not interested in holding the viewer’s hand in discussing it. Its only white characters are clearly bad guys and its black characters are shown as beautiful even when they are just a bunch of guys on the street talking shit. The Last Black Man in San Francisco reminded me of Moonlight in its framing of the Black male body as worthy of dreamy background colors and classical music that basically begs the viewer to adore it. And as much as this film is about inequity and violence and systems of oppression, it is also about storytelling and how stories both reflect those systems and reinforce them. The play that is put on towards the end of the movie is masterful and really felt terribly appropriate for the current moment. It also signaled an amount of self-awareness from the filmmakers that only makes it more impressive that the whole thing does not feel more didactic or patronizing. Maybe give this one a shot if you haven’t seen it yet.
EATING This vegan naan with some soy curls marinated in spiced coconut yogurt and cooked on a gridle, big salads with white bean hummus turned into dressing or more lazy ones with store-bought dressings my father-in-law picked up because he saw they were vegan, grilled Beyond burgers and veggie skewers paired with watermelon margaritas, smoothies with frozen berries, hemp hearts and tahini, and way too much oatmilk ice cream. And the almond cake I am sharing below, strictly because there is still so much almond flour in our pantry and I’m really not sure where it is coming from.
When I was a kid growing in Croatia a dollar or so of Croatian currency would get you two scoops of gelato at basically any cafe or restaurant along the Adriatic coast. I drowned in gelato every summer. One of my favorite flavors was straciatella: a light and creamy take on vanilla speckled with chunks of chocolate, almost like a more cold whipped cream with your favorite chocolate bar folded in but so much more luxurious and creamy. I started thinking about it lasy week when I came across some cocoa nibs in our pantry and ended up with this impromptu cake. It’s an accidentally gluten and grain free almond cake sweetened with maple syrup, spiked with plenty of vanilla and aforementioned cocoa nibs then baked until soft and moist but not too high. I covered it with a barely sweetened cashew cream and a good layer of grated chocolate.
For one small cake you will need
1/4 cup maple syrup or other liquid sweetener
1/4 cup and 2 tbsp almond or other nondairy milk
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1.5 cups superfine almond flour
1/4 cup cornstarch (but other starches probably work too)
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp cocoa nibs, chocolate chunks of chocolate chips + more for topping
1 tbsp coconut or raw sugar (optional)
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line the bottom of a small cake or brownie pan with parchment paper or grease with vegetable oil or (vegan) butter
In a big bowl whisk all liquid ingredients until well incorporated
In another bowl whisk all dry ingredients except for cocoa nibs until well mixed, making sure the almond flour and cornstarch don’t clump
Fold dry ingredients into wet with a spatula until no dry streaks remain, the batter will be wet and sticky
Mix in cocoa nibs in a few quick folds with a spatula
Pour into the prepared cake pan and smooth out so it’s distributed evenly, sprinkle extra cocoa nibs and sugar on top as desired
Bake for 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center. The top should be slightly brown and if you poke the cake with your finger it should have a slight bit of bounce. It will not rise much so expect a low cake or bake in a loaf pan for more thickness.
Let cool in the pan for about 5 minutes then transfer to a wire cooling rack and let cool completely until frosting
About the frosting: I blended about 1/2-3/4 cup of cashews that soaked in cold water in the fridge overnight with maybe 1/3-1/2 cup almond milk, a tablespoon or two of maple syrup and maybe a teaspoon’s worth of lemon juice and teaspoon’s worth of vanilla. I just tasted and adjusted as I went along, blending until very creamy. After spreading the cashew frosting on top of the cake, I grated some chocolate to top and refrigerated the whole thing for about two hours. I would definitely wait for at least an hour before cutting the whole thing into bars or squares.
For other frosting ideas, I think whipped coconut cream would work well, as would any purely chocolatey frosting such as this aggressively healthy-fied one.