amentainsularis - Tumblr blog

[amentainsularis]

It’s been a long time since I last posted here on Tumblr.

I had a rough start of the year, both personally and academically, but I’ve kept myself quite busy.

Firstly, I visited a new city to study some very cool Bronze Age skeletons. The work itself was very gratifying but I spent a whole week in a basement working in a complete mess, I wasn’t expecting it but archaeology can be like this sometimes. At least I got the opportunity to study kids that were buried with swords (!!!)

Also, I’m studying for a job opportunity that came up. I can’t say much right now but if I get it I would get to work on completely new topics.

I have an enormous amount of things to do and very little energy to keep up with it but I’m definitely trying my best here. Hopefully, spring will be a little bit better!

I know very few people follow my blog but I promise to myself that I will bring more interesting content on here. Maybe something more educational about my job…?

Any ideas? Requests? Suggestions?

[amentainsularis]

they should invent a life that is liveable and a sleep that comes easy and a winter that doesn't feel like decay and a spring that doesn't feel like the past and a head that doesn't hurt and a heart that doesn't sit in your chest like a rock and a body that doesn't hate you and a hometown that doesn't make you lose your mind and a university that won't kill you they should invent a me that is normal I think that would be really neat. ok good night I love you

[amentainsularis]

What she says: im fine

What she means: the average age of conception over the past 250k years is apparently 26.9. Let's round it down to 25. Think of your birth mother. Hold her hand. Imagine her holding hands with her mother. Within 4 people, you're back in time 100 years, and it's an intimate family dinner. Just after WWI. Add another 16 people, a small party of 20, and you're in the 1500s. Double it, twice, and you're at 80 people. Your family would fill a restaurant, and you're at the height of the Roman empire. At 100 people, Confucius is alive but Socrates has not yet been born. 100 people. That's a medium sized wedding. A small lecture theatre or concert. 200 people, probably the biggest party i could ever hope to host, takes you back 5000 years. The guests at your soirée of parents would be contemporaries of the Egyptian and Indus Valley civilisations, although you'd probably be too busy fixing drinks and nibbles to talk to all of them. Just imagine it. 200 of you. That's all it takes to get back 5,000 years. And we could go further. 1000 people, a decent sized concert, a large high school, and we're at the end of the last ice age. Your ancestors are comparing their pink floyd vinyl with music played on instruments carved from wood or bones of long vanished species. Wander through the crowd. See your own features and phrases and gestures refract out like a kaleidoscope. What would they make of you? What do you make of them? Why does it feel so unfair that even that first 100 years --that small family dinner of four--is out of your grasp? Maybe it's because questions of spatial distance have become negligible to us now. why, oh why, does time hold out against us so stubbornly

[amentainsularis]

I thought you might like these moss-filled pawprints in concrete which I saw earlier. :-)

[amentainsularis]

[amentainsularis]

I just realized that the kanji for bone, 「骨」, looks like a little skeleton fella, and I can't get over it...

[amentainsularis]

queer novel masterlist: Palestine edition

Found this list via @evereadssapphic on Instagram.

You Exist Too Much, Zaina Arafat

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings--for love, and a place to call home.

Haifa Fragments, Khulud Khamis

As a designer of jewelry, Maisoon wants an ordinary extraordinary life, which isn't easy for a tradition-defying activist and Palestinian citizen of Israel who refuses to be crushed by the feeling that she is an unwelcome guest in the land of her ancestors. She volunteers for the Machsom Watch, an organization that helps children in the Occupied Territories cross the border to receive medical care. Frustrated by her boyfriend Ziyad and her father, who both want her to get on with life and forget those in the Occupied Territories, she lashes out only to discover her father isn't the man she thought he was. Raised a Christian, in a relationship with a Muslim man and enamored with a Palestinian woman from the Occupied Territories, Maisoon must decide her own path.

A Map Of Home, Randa Jarrar

In this fresh, funny, and fearless debut novel, Randa Jarrar chronicles the coming-of-age of Nidali, one of the most unique and irrepressible narrators in contemporary fiction. Born in 1970s Boston to an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, the rebellious Nidali--whose name is a feminization of the word "struggle"--soon moves to a very different life in Kuwait. There the family leads a mildly eccentric middle-class existence until the Iraqi invasion drives them first to Egypt and then to Texas. This critically acclaimed debut novel is set to capture the hearts of everyone who has ever wondered what their own map of home might look like.

The Skin And Its Girl, Sarah Cypher

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha's gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she's ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family's cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt's complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us--and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.

The Philistine, Leila Marshy

Nadia Eid doesn't know it yet, but she's about to change her life. It's the end of the ‘80s and she hasn’t seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him. But now she’s twenty-five and he’s missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Québecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo. But nothing goes as planned and, stumbling around, Nadia wanders into an art gallery where she meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist who becomes first her guide and then her lover. 

Through this unexpected relationship, Nadia rediscovers her roots, her language, and her ambitions, as her father demonstrates the unavoidable destiny of becoming a Philistine – the Arabic word for Palestinian. With Manal’s career poised to take off and her father’s secret life revealed, the First Intifada erupts across the border.

The Twenty-Ninth Year, Hala Alyan

For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past--memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith--winds itself around the present.

Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies.

A vivid catalog of heartache, loneliness, love and joy, The Twenty-Ninth Year is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.

Between Banat, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali

In Between Banat Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire amid heteronormative imperatives. Showing how systems of heteropatriarchy and Arab nationalisms foreclose queer Arab women's futures, she draws on the transliterated term "banat"--the Arabic word for girls--to refer to women, femmes, and nonbinary people who disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the "Arab woman." By attending to Arab women's narration of desire and identity, queer Arab critique substantiates queer Arab histories while challenging Orientalist and Arab national paradigms that erase queer subjects. In this way, Shomali frames queerness and Arabness as relational and transnational subject formations and contends that prioritizing transnational collectivity over politics of authenticity, respectability, and inclusion can help lead toward queer freedom.

Belladonna, Anbara Salam

Isabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their Connecticut Catholic school, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella.

In 1957, when the girls graduate, they land coveted spots at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Pentila in northern Italy, a prestigious art history school on the grounds of a silent convent. There, free of her claustrophobic home and the town that will always see her and her Egyptian mother as outsiders, Bridget discovers she can reinvent herself as anyone she desires... perhaps even someone Isabella could desire in return.

But as that glittering year goes on, Bridget begins to suspect Isabella is keeping a secret from her, one that will change the course of their lives forever. (I believe this book is by a Palestinian author but not actually set in or about Palestine.)

[amentainsularis]

Paleo art inspired by Minoan frescoes

[amentainsularis]

Just casually dropping here for the passing-bys:

If you perhaps happen to want to talk with a nerdy bioarchaeologist about whatever, my ask button and messages are open. I'd love to get to know more people on here!

[amentainsularis]

Ezio Anichini

[amentainsularis]

Last week I took a trip abroad for the first time in five years! I did touristy walks around Antwerp and spent lovely quality time with a dear friend who is now living there (I ate lots of waffles too!).

Today, I went to the library to borrow some books and when I arrived at work I found boxes containing skeletons deposited right by my chair. And this is the Anthropology department for you!!

Now, it's me and my lolita dress against Academia. Time to put on my current obsession (Kælan Mikla = Icelandic post-punk. Very dark and cool, I recommend listening if you're into this genre) and get this manuscript done!

[amentainsularis]

Every fun post on here that encourages people to have hobbies/be creative always gets an avalanche of "Some people are poor Karen" type reactions and respectfully, you're all super annoying. I've never lived above the poverty line and this is a list of hobbies I have that were cheap or entirely free:

Read books: Go to the library, lend a book from a friend

knitting, crochet, embroidery: Get some needles from the bargan store and ask around, people have leftovers from projects they'll happily give you. Thrift stores also often carry leftover fabric and other supplies. And talk about your hobby loud enough and an old lady will show up and gift you their whole collection, because there are way more old ladies with a closet full of wool than there are grandchildren who want to take up the hobby.

Origami/paper crafts: get some scrap paper and scissors, watch a youtube tutorial

walking: put on shoes open door

pilates/yoga/etc: get a mat or just use your carpet, watch a youtube tutorial

Houseplants: look online for people that swap plant cuttings. There are always people giving out stuff for free to get you started. If you're nice enough you'll probably get extra

gardening: You're gonna need some space for this one of course but you can just play around with seeds and cuttings from your grocery vegetables.

aquarium keeping is a bit of an obscure one but I got most of my stuff second hand for cheap or free and now I have a few thousand euro worth of material and plants.

drawing/art: You get very far just playing with bargan store materials. I did my entire art degree with mostly those.

writing: Rotate a cow in your head for free

cooking: again one you can make very expensive, but there are many budget recipes online for free. Look for African or Asian shops to get good rice and cheap spices.

Join a non-profit: Cities will have creative organisations who let you use woodworking machines or screen presses or laser cutters or 3D printers etc etc etc for a small fee. Some libraries also lend out materials.

candle making: You need some molds (cheap), wick, two old cooking pots for au bain marie melting and a ton of scrap candles, ask people to keep them aside for you.

a herbarium, flower pressing: Leaves are free, wildflowers too, ask if you can take from peoples gardens.

puzzles: thrift stores, your grandma probably

Citizen science: look for projects in your area or get the iNaturalist app

And lastly and most importantly: Share! Share your supllies, share your knowledge. Surround yourself with other creative people and before you know it someone will give you a pot of homemade jam and when you want to paint your kabinet someone will have leftover paint in just the right color and you can give them a homemade candle in return and everyone is having fun and building skills and friendships and not a cent is exchanged. We have always lived like this, it's what humans are build to do.

And all of it sure beats sitting behind a computer going "No stranger, I refuse to let myself have a good time."

Anyway I'm logging off bc I'm making some badges for a friend who cooked for me and then I'm going to fix some holes in everyones clothes.

[amentainsularis]

found the best vase ever. it looks like something one of my students would doodle on their latin homework and i love it

[amentainsularis]

just like being butch, being femme is my gender identity. it's my presentation. it's how I am in relationships, both romantic and platonic. it's how I am in my community. it's how I relate to the world.

more respect for femmes, please. we're not vapid creatures with no thoughts and we're not playing into cisheteronormativity.

terfs and radfems STAY OFF THIS POST I HATE YOU

[amentainsularis]

I have ended up working on three different projects at the same time. Keywords are catch-up growth, teen mums, and stress on the growing bone. My current position in university is terribly precarious and makes me quite uneasy. But my love for this subject is growing, and I can’t help giving in to my unstable life made of books and old bones. My stress levels are way above average, but at least I’m enjoying this ride so far!

Also, I started tutoring students during their practical osteoarchaeology lessons. I LOVE IT! The students were so excited to learn and made brilliant deductions about the individuals they were studying. I hope they keep on with this motivation.

+ Our department also hosts the botanical garden. I often escape there when my coworkers get too annoying.

[amentainsularis]

It's ironic (not really!) that people are always like: "we need to talk more about mental health and neurodiversity," but also: "you're just seeking attention" whenever we speak about our experiences beyond the stereotypes or when we show actual symptoms…

[amentainsularis]

In this house, we do not subscribe to the convention of vilifying Demeter in the myth of Persephone.