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5 - Following the Beast Familiar: Djuna Barnes’s Family Dramas
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- By Peter Adkins
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Saskia McCracken
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- Book:
- Beastly Modernisms
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 21 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2023, pp 91-106
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Summary
The unsigned reader report for Djuna Barnes’s three-act play, Biography of Julie van Bartmann, strikes a note of hesitant praise that would become all too familiar to the author when dealing with publishers and editors in the coming decades:
This play contains some of the most vigorous and pungent writing that has come to my attention in some time. […] I do not claim to be able to state clearly the theme and the plot of this play. […] The play would be perplexing to an audience, but for the reader it has many stimulating qualities in the midst of a little that is confusing. (Barnes 1924: n.p.)
An ‘eloquent and revealing commentary on the more passionate zone of life’ (Barnes 1924: n.p.), the play presents the narrative of a world-famous opera singer, Julie van Bartmann, paying a visit to a small American farmstead run by an eccentric and visionary farmer named Basil Born, along with his children Gart, Gustava and Costa. Despite the mixture of admiration and ambivalence in the reader’s report, the play was neither published nor performed in Barnes’s lifetime. Her first novel, Ryder (1928), also set on a farm under the rule of an unconventional patriarch, Wendell Ryder, recycled material from Biography of Julie van Bartmann and garnered a similar mixed reception. When her editor at Boni and Liveright, Donald S. Friede, read it, he complained that he ‘did not like it half as much as [he had] expected to’, voicing his disapproval of its collage of literary ‘effects’ and fearing that it might be ‘the type of book whose sale is purely problematical’ (Friede 1927: n.p.). And when, in the 1950s, Barnes once again mined material from her childhood to be reimagined within her drama The Antiphon, T. S. Eliot continued the trend. On receiving a typescript of the play in 1954, he explained that he was struggling to comprehend both its language and its plot, and felt it to be extremely obscure.
Family Minds: A randomized controlled trial of a group intervention to improve foster parents’ reflective functioning
- Tina Adkins, Samantha Reisz, Dilara Hasdemir, Peter Fonagy
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- Journal:
- Development and Psychopathology / Volume 34 / Issue 3 / August 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 15 February 2021, pp. 1177-1191
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- Article
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Family Minds is a brief group psychoeducational parenting intervention designed to increase the reflective functioning (RF) and mentalization skills of foster parents. RF is important for foster parents who have to build relationships with children whose adverse experiences increase their risk for psychosocial challenges. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) for Family Minds was conducted in Texas with 89 foster parents. The main aims of this study were to examine whether the intervention could significantly increase the RF/mentalization skills of the foster parents and decrease their parenting stress. After 6 weeks, compared with the control group, intervention foster parents improved their RF via a lowering of pre-mentalizing and also significantly decreased parenting stress related to parent–child dysfunctional interactions. Other measures of RF and parenting stress showed no significant differences between groups. Foster child behavior was not significantly different between groups, although data at 6 months showed a possible lowering of internalizing symptoms for children of intervention parents. This RCT provides some encouraging evidence that Family Minds may increase RF in foster parents, improve parental sensitivity and their ability to emotionally regulate, decrease parenting stress related to challenging interactions with their foster children, and possibly decrease children's internalizing behavior.
Marine20—The Marine Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curve (0–55,000 cal BP)
- Part of
- Timothy J Heaton, Peter Köhler, Martin Butzin, Edouard Bard, Ron W Reimer, William E N Austin, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Pieter M Grootes, Konrad A Hughen, Bernd Kromer, Paula J Reimer, Jess Adkins, Andrea Burke, Mea S Cook, Jesper Olsen, Luke C Skinner
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- Journal:
- Radiocarbon / Volume 62 / Issue 4 / August 2020
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 August 2020, pp. 779-820
- Print publication:
- August 2020
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- Article
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The concentration of radiocarbon (14C) differs between ocean and atmosphere. Radiocarbon determinations from samples which obtained their 14C in the marine environment therefore need a marine-specific calibration curve and cannot be calibrated directly against the atmospheric-based IntCal20 curve. This paper presents Marine20, an update to the internationally agreed marine radiocarbon age calibration curve that provides a non-polar global-average marine record of radiocarbon from 0–55 cal kBP and serves as a baseline for regional oceanic variation. Marine20 is intended for calibration of marine radiocarbon samples from non-polar regions; it is not suitable for calibration in polar regions where variability in sea ice extent, ocean upwelling and air-sea gas exchange may have caused larger changes to concentrations of marine radiocarbon. The Marine20 curve is based upon 500 simulations with an ocean/atmosphere/biosphere box-model of the global carbon cycle that has been forced by posterior realizations of our Northern Hemispheric atmospheric IntCal20 14C curve and reconstructed changes in CO2 obtained from ice core data. These forcings enable us to incorporate carbon cycle dynamics and temporal changes in the atmospheric 14C level. The box-model simulations of the global-average marine radiocarbon reservoir age are similar to those of a more complex three-dimensional ocean general circulation model. However, simplicity and speed of the box model allow us to use a Monte Carlo approach to rigorously propagate the uncertainty in both the historic concentration of atmospheric 14C and other key parameters of the carbon cycle through to our final Marine20 calibration curve. This robust propagation of uncertainty is fundamental to providing reliable precision for the radiocarbon age calibration of marine based samples. We make a first step towards deconvolving the contributions of different processes to the total uncertainty; discuss the main differences of Marine20 from the previous age calibration curve Marine13; and identify the limitations of our approach together with key areas for further work. The updated values for ΔR, the regional marine radiocarbon reservoir age corrections required to calibrate against Marine20, can be found at the data base http://calib.org/marine/.
Smoke derived from burnt vegetation stimulates germination of arable weeds
- S.W. Adkins, N.C.B. Peters
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- Journal:
- Seed Science Research / Volume 11 / Issue 3 / September 2001
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 22 February 2007, pp. 213-222
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A commercially available smoke-water solution (Seed Starter®) stimulated the germination of caryopses and intact florets of Avena fatuaL. The solution was most effective when diluted (5–50%) and presented to intact or dehulled grain that had received a short period of dry after-ripening. It was less effective when applied at full strength or to grains that had been freshly harvested. The same stimulatory effect was observed in partly after-ripened caryopses of nine different wild oat biotypes obtained from three different cropping regions of the world. When freshly harvested caryopses were re-tested with the commercial solution (100%) for just 7 days prior to placement on to distilled water, a much higher germination percentage was possible than seen with continuous smoke-water incubation. The stimulatory ability of smoke water was more closely matched to that of gibberellic acid than to potassium nitrate, which had little or no effect on freshly harvested caryopses. The smoke-water solution (5–100%) was tested on the germination of 18 other cool temperate arable weed species. All monocotyledonous species tested (viz. Avena sterilis ssp. ludoviciana L., Alopecurus myosuroides, Sorghum halepense, Phalaris paradoxa) responded positively, while those of the dicotyledonous species were either strongly stimulated (≥40%stimulation Malva neglecta), moderately stimulated (≥20% stimulation Galium aparine, Veronica persica), slightly stimulated (Polygonum persicaria, P. pennsylvanicum, Fallopia convolvulus), unaffected (P. aviculare, Sinapis arvensis, Heracleum sphondylium, Angelica sylvestris, Mercurialis annua, Veronica hederifolia) or inhibited (Lamium purpureum). The optimal concentrations required to stimulate germination of the monocotyledonous species were similar to those observed for A. fatua (5–10%). However, for the dicotyledonous species slightly stronger solutions were required (10–20%). When the unaffected species were retested using a 10-day pre-chilling treatment, smoke water showed a small promotive response in three (S. arvensis, P. aviculare and V. hederifolia) of the six species. When four different smoke-water solutions (Seed Starter®, ®, charred-wood solution and wheat-straw solution) were tested on two representative species (A. fatua and M. neglecta), three formulations were effective in promoting the germination of both species, while the fourth (charred-wood solution) was only active on A. fatua. The active concentrations were different for the four solutions. Three solutions were active in the 2–20% dilution range, while the fourth (®) was only active in the 1–2% dilution range and was inhibitory at higher concentrations. These observations are discussed in the context that smoke may play an important ecological role in the management and control of introduced weeds in native and arable communities.