Terminology used in the study and practice of statistics that could be interpreted as meaning something else, and not numerical:

confidence intervals, critical value, proportional reduction in error, residual plots, sum of absolute error, standard deviation, adjusted means, power function, repeated measures, violations of assumptions, conditional predictions, degrees of freedom, dummy codes, outliers, planned comparisons, power transformations, random transformations, unbiasedness, rank perturbation,

new ways of creating poetry in the new generation

You love me, you love me not.
Last petal drops. The daisies rot.

Acrostic: favourite poet

I decided to search the index of the first sentences of new thorough anthology of Frank O'Hara's poems, and make an acrostic for his name using the lines beginning with corresponding letters, should it work. Luckily, it did


Five sobs lined up on the doorstep
Rooftops blocks away from me
Awakening, now the war has broken out.
Now it seems Far Away and Gentle
Kra Kra

On the vast highway
'
Here we are again together
Apricots! parishes!
Red ringles in the sunset!
And I do nothing new.

When I thought of the past, I had
to stop because it made me sad
thinking that I did not fulfil any
of the dreams I'd thought I had.

New days come like the past seems to fade away
with no beginnings, all dissociative
morning songs, and I am rapt
in fugue cloud and sun dapple, reflected
onto torn screens. I only just feel it
hit my just woke skin.
The stain from underneath a warm cup
embeds itself in rings like a signet's seal
on all the cluttering, all my belongings.
Gold-amber turned to seafoam green.
The moment of that colour conception
is loved and jilted by lacklustre artist's
half heart oblivion, trying to catch
the detail in all and anything
but only/in order to overlook
everything else.
Anything else? A plate of buttered toast
and a chilled glass of-
and in the absence of one thing,
find another, find another, feel for another.
Another is felt for,, slummed for,
mourned for, maddening-gone for,
hurry-upped for, make-believed for.
Rhapsodies in blues,
elbows on the tables,
clear-eyed sight, clear-cut smile
Find the ones you do not confuse.

The beliefs of R.D. Laing- a video I made

One of my fantasy dinner party guests, heroes, and top choices if I were ranking historical figures based on how much they fascinate me in the present, R.D. Laing was the pioneer of the 60's anti-psychiatry movement. His belief that insanity as observed from the outside as what one would call insanity is only a sane reaction to an insane environment as it is experienced by the one who is supposedly insane was one that stood in direct opposition to attitudes of contemporary Western medicine, which advocated medication and electroshock convulsion treatment and lobotomies and other such extreme physiologically-damaging procedures. Most importantly, he taught that we can never truly experience the world as anyone but we ourselves are experiencing it. We can only observe, and experience the observing of those who are observing our experience of observing them etc. etc. So we can never wholly understand what is mad and what is not because we are all experiencing it all so differently, and putting us into diagnostic categories can be dangerous when it starts to cut divides between peoples and marginalise some and put people into boxes where they will not be treated as human, for labels of 'madness' remove all credibility, a basic human right.

I made a little film about him. Mostly it's about the audio and what he says but the clips are there to aid the listening.

Mourning suits (a poem revised)

How did you wear it so easily, make
your head hang so naturally?
Perhaps it's one of those things for only some people.
For some, mourning suits.
I'm not one of them.

Tell me, how did you cut your grief
so clean in half, just like
a smile I saw caught
in the gleam of sun on a swimming pool,
shimmering in a mirage
or a lifetime ago,
when the summer heat knew us
and was simmering
around us, lifetimes ago.
It cut the world in half,

divided then from now,
divided moonlight,
split open decay
to allow for more decay.
We've been doing that since May.

Now it's autumn, meaning
cold feet and a pile of laundry
losing heat, and inconsolable sky and
a train pulls into the platform, empties itself,
and on a sixth floor balcony,
evening dewdrops cling to the railing,
trembling, shy.
The thud of old telephone books,
thrashing in the wind.
Our bones shook, as we went on
running on,
ruining one
another for anybody else.
Everybody else.

Broken leaves, gold and russet.
Seasons leave us more than people do so
why is it we don't mourn the fallen from trees
as well as wars and cars and wars and wars and wars.
The 11th of the 11th month at 11 they called
for peace. Rest in peace.

At 11:11 I wish that
someone somewhere
will soon kiss away
my idiosyncrasies
and my memories
until they sigh,
bye, bye, and you're gone
as if never here.

They always say earth is a place you didn't belong.
Cold and birdsong, chuckling at the window.
You are always there- yes you,
at the edge of that photograph
in lecture halls. in guitar chords,
in nothing-at-alls, in hospital wards.

Your face, slow-burning,
an after-image, across fields of morning light,
under the lapels of mourning suits.

Retrospective perspective productivity activity

I found this while I was sorting through and throwing out (yes, actually throwing into the bin and therefore letting go of) box after box of papers.

Introduction = sowing the seeds = the moment of conception = an idea planted, grows = we go about planting kisses = flower beds = petal soft pillowcases = the feel of your cheek's touch = sleeve, where I am wearing my heart = worn out = feeling wrists to find a pulse = a search for vital signs = warning, danger ahead = the curse and blessing of the power of forethought = chess games and computational decision trees = detaching from all emotion to access pure reason = choking on Kant's passages (and there's nothing pure about that) = mouthful of musings = philosophy pieces = information that people can't or won't swallow = nobody wants neuroscience at the dinner table = meditations on a mealtime = hospital 2004-5, 2007, 2010  = food and feelings group = a whole new language and unnatural associations = learning to speak, or say it in other ways = a critical period to make them understand = growing up, growing into new habits, growing out of old ones = life is a line, not a circle = drawing lines = boundaries, beginnings and endings  = it begins to take shape = life is not a shape = the possibility of something else other than fulfilment, other than completion, in a life as happy as any other = setting apart now and then, us and them, happy or not, good or not, too much or not enough, all or none = ways to categorise everything and everyone and ourselves = social cognition = part of human nature = unnaturally human = war, schadenfreude, Josef Fritzel = I do not understand = what is the point? = small purposes and pleasures, and the process of seeking them out = ketchup and small pots of jam and teaspoons =everything shrinking away = figurative and literal = most things = food and feelings = such is life, such it has been = you don't notice strangeness until it is all you have seen until the moment you noticed everything, strangely - new eyes, fresh sight = laser surgery = sight for sore eyes = another one I don't understand = meeting new people = Introduction.

During the process of looking through years' of writing, I can only in retrospect appreciate the beauty of misunderstanding and teaching yourself to understand, making mistakes and cleaning them up to only make them again in different forms, to changing all of the time and yet feeling fossilized, or paralysed, or petrified, and then seeing all that written down in certainty, unwitting of how the certainty itself is uncertainty and overall, the only consistency throughout all I've found so far in my Aladdin's nostalgic cave of pictures and words and ticket stubs and scribbles and receipts and notes left by friends and phone numbers written by strangers and love letters written from lovers and not lovers and poems and pages torn out and blacked out and everything else, like the equation of relations between the subjective and introspective, nonsensical and identical.. the only thing that never seems to change is that it's all so stubbornly inconsistent. I used to think that looking back at writing and collections of keepsakes and mementos from the past would help piece together a picture of a life like compiling a jigsaw puzzle until it all looks clear, but now I realise how making a narrative of our own lives, making our selves consistent and into a story told as time elapses, is something that our mind forces us to do without us knowing we are doing it, and that keeping a paper trail as you go along, like I have, is something that fights against that. I've only just seen this. This mess doesn't make sense of me, it just makes sense that it is a mess because the years that passed up until now were awfully messy while I was writing them down, my writing becoming messier. It is the writing things down in the moment, or trying to typewrite feelings in the moments we feel them, or keeping souvenirs from the moments, trying to make matter of them, that retrospectively pulls apart the stories we have stitched together to form a comprehensive narrative for the life lived so far. We weave the threads of these stories to make sense of random senselessness and chaos and endless mess, so that it all means something. Seen together, the story doesn't make sense as it didn't then and why should it? It all matters as much anyway. 

The world is your oyster, 
Just follow your heart,
Please drop each platitudinous phrase,
The oyster was swallowed,
and every path that I've followed
I only took in search of your praise.

him

It frightens me-
the eyes that now stare,
maddened by some desire
(there must be some mistake)
but what scares me more
is what he is able to make
of that which he cares for
(a liar, heartbreak)

Praying that thoughts of ends would never
have to come, putting a sign on the door,
do not disturb for knocking 
because we were out watching our city
glowing from Primrose Hill.
The sun was tossed up, round and bright gold,
and I was off my head with how beautiful
one morning, one moment, could be.
I remembered someone telling me once
that good literature comforts the disturbed
and disturbs the comfortable.
Some things so faraway, all is kept neat,
but up close it's just crawling and dirty
and how can you be sure that you are not blind?
Nobody looks you in the eye
and letters never come on time
and I was trying to read your mind
even though we are both scarecrows
with no birds to scare.
Questions but no answers, or rather
no purpose for the questions we might have
for what can a mind made only of straw
really mind about another
mind made up
until the very last straw?
We stood there, watching the city watch us
with its big spinning eye, and you said
something about justice.
I disagreed, said something back about mercy
and turning away from what you've seen
like you went blind
long enough to be kind.
The clouds were hanging in black cloaks
and none of them lonely, and nor are we,
for what these words are worth:
One for sorrow, two for delights
Tomorrow, you'll be catching all the lights.
We took the underground train home
because we thought to stop at the museum of natural history
would turn habits and thoughts that are old
into to fossils, turn fools into gold,
and turn questions into mystery.

A patchwork person

I think if I were a fictional character, or if there was one character I most resemble in my disposition, there wouldn't be a specific individual but a specific combination of three or four.  None of whom I am considering in terms of their best features, but it is more their flaws that make them sort of fictional representations of parts of myself, that I can relate to. 

Firstly, there's Neely O'Hara, a precocious 17 year old with talent who recklessly throws herself into an addiction to all kinds of pills in order achieve the greatness she feels she wants and her promising career is destroyed by her drive which is both self-destructive and stubborn. Then there is Lux Lisbon who is kept largely a mystery to the reader/film-watcher of the Virgin Suicides, but it seems that she feels trapped and rebels against the structure imposed upon her. She has sexual encounters that feel empty to her and seems to neglect herself, and in the film she loses her virginity to someone who she knows finds her attractive, who then leaves her immediately afterwards, which is probably something that contributes to her participation in the mass suicide commited by her and her sisters. Then there is Astrid from White Oleander, whose personality is so pliable she becomes a mirror of whoever is around her, or else she protects herself by adapting her appearance to get the reaction she wants, but before she knows what she wants, she asks other people what she is like so she can have an identity for herself. She copies how others behave and talk and in the book she describes herself as having a face that says, 'I'll do anything, just please love me.' Finally, there is Blanche Dubois. I think I was a lot more like her before the bubble burst and the delusions became clear as delusions. She is quite stuck in her bubble, but I think the way Tennessee Williams describes her as being 'uncertain' in her manner, having movement that 'suggests a moth', and the ways in which she is incredibly needy of attention but only the kind of attention that she wants and is in control of, is something I feel is echoed in me, and again, this is another not-so-positive attribute. Then again if asked what my good qualities are I would find it hard to come by them. My mother was always afraid of me embarrassing myself (or being embarrassed by me) as I was growing up so I was never told I was especially good at anything until I'd really proved it. I suppose that way I'd never turn out to be one of those people who humiliates themselves on X factor thinking they can sing but they can't. And it stopped me from becoming complacent or deluded about possessing talents or positive qualities that weren't actual or obvious to anyone else. But it also prevented me from being able to make claims that I have any to this day. Not that it's my mother's fault. They do fuck you up, but you fuck them up too, and you'll fuck it all up completely if you go about being bitter and blaming parents, the world, extraneous influences etc. for fucking with you because you'll end up cynical and bitter and one of those people others feel sorry for. So I'm glad my mother never gave me false hopes, because I know now any hopes I do have are ones I've earned my own right to possess. I won't ever think I'm great at anything because I'm not, and I won't ever be able to write a good cover letter or big myself up, but I'll be able to get the certificate to prove I'm as good as I need to be, and I won't go around pointing fingers at whomever for making me whatever it is I turn out to be. So maybe that's how I'm different than all these characters. And the way in which I'm better: I'm real, obviously. 

If there was a dictionary
containing an entry for Daisy
like any other word
beyond synonyms for this disposition
such as crazy, on adverb
i.e. nervously, clumsily
I don't think there would be a a way to define
me, or Daisy, ever clumsy,
but what is written in each line
of the grandiloquent poetry that isn't mine
and is not for me but about me
now penned by those who look but don't see

because if they did see they'd realise
I am no material with which o rhapodise
and there is nothing poetic
about something this pathetic,
only
pathetically,
such ugly
honesty