CarPeo Set Piece ... [#42] ... Impressionist View From The Wetlands

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© Oliverio
Magnolia @ Broadway
Looking South 

(90802)

The next
CarPeo Set Piece
is
here. 

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Shocking News From The Borowitz Report

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KREMLIN NAMES TRUMP

EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH

          

"No one has worked more tirelessly
for the glory of the Fatherland
than Donald Trump,"
Russian President Vladimir Putin
said in an official statement.
"He has set a high bar for
all Kremlin employees,
and, for that, we salute him," 

David Borowitz

The next 
GoFather/Trump page
is  here.  
  

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As Musical Infants, The Rolling Stones Were Walking His Dog

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That was more than fifty years ago,

when the Rolling Stones were merely

a cover Blues Band 
with no songwriting

credits of their own.

But somebody should have covered the song
containing this profound geological truth
expounded by Mr. Thomas:

*****The world is round*****

*****but it's crooked just the same*****

Rufus Thomas 

Rufus Thomas
–singer, songwriter, producer, DJ–
billed himself as
"The Oldest Teenager in the World."

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An Equation From The Lewis Carroll School Of Logic

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Let w = the entire course of world history

Let  x = the amount of money, stolen at gunpoint

Let  y  = the amount of money robbed from banks

Let  z  = the dollar amount of stolen art

THEN

z = 4 (x +y)

 

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GOM: The Novel ... Chapter 2

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It is mid August, 2016.

Somewhere in Arkansas,
from the driver's seat
of a 16-foot, 6-wheeled
moving truck, I tell her
a story about driving
through Arkansas
in a Honda Civic.

That year was 2004.

I was moving from California
to Virginia, in search of family.

I drove through ten states 
and the average interstate speed–
mostly in cruise-control–
was 65 mph.

That was true for every state
except Arkansas, where roadwork
was everywhere along
Interstate-40.

That is not exactly true:
Signs indicating construction
projects on I-40 were everywhere.

Road crews were rarely to be seen
but what did happen at each site:
traffic was reduced to one lane
and the speed limit
was reduced to 
20 mph.

In 2004, I could not help but think of the home state
of the previous President of the United States:

Before leaving office, President Clinton
had pork-barreled mega-bucks for infra-structure
in his home state, creating countless jobs
for Arkansanians and many slow motion
moments on the interstate highways.

As a life-time New Yorker
and hardcore Clinton hater,
I thought she would appreciate
this information. 
 
I enjoyed telling her this story
because she did not interrupt me once
while my eyes were fixed on the road,
undeterred by glances at the passenger seat.

She did not interrupt me for what became 
an obvious reason:

She had been asleep for the entire time
after we stopped at a Cracker Barrel
in West Memphis to clean the windshield
and eat a hearty lunch.

If you have seen one Cracker Barrel,
you have seen them all
is a statement that is
99.9% true.

You can rely on their food to be
tastefully mediocre and you
are guaranteed to hear
at least one Hank Williams
song coming out of the walls.

Maybe you get lucky and
you get a Patsy Cline ballad. 

Except the West Memphis CB
had something no other 
Cracker Barrel had:
the staff was entirely black
and the food tasted better
than mediocre!
***  

© Paul Oliverio 
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GOM: The Novel ... Chapter 1

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Humans are so adaptable and humans 

have the capability of  speech 

that declares as much.

But all species are adaptable 

and have some form of speech.

Since we cannot understand the lingo

of the lynx or the buffalo,

we call them non-communicants.

 

What singles out humans is the need to state—

through their vaulted powers of speech—

their undeniable superiority to all other species. 

This is what psychologists call

an indelible sign of an inferiority complex.

Ask any commuter at rush hour who is moving

less than one mile an hour but looks up

to a sky full of birds flying free-form 

with no bottlenecked

lanes of flight.

     

Ask that bottlenecked commuter

which is the superior species.

     

Mr. Bottleneck (or Ms. Bottleneck) would,

of course, add a qualifier:

But has any bird ever created

a printing press or a computer?

The answer is no bird has ever had 

a need to invent such things.

*** 

Get yourself into a hellish environment

and conclude soundly:

This is no time

to act like

an angel.

Get yourself into a segue

and conclude soundly:

This is the time

for a non-sequitir. 

***

We were ninety miles out of Memphis

and there was a hotel.

We got a room and did

what was to be done

in a hotel room.

The next morning,

driving with freeway cruise control, 

Memphis was more three hours away.

The ninety miles was correct

but there was a single digit

in the hundreds column.

I was correct for believing

in those Ninety miles

I was only incomplete

in my thinking.

I was a half-wit,

slightly less than

half-accurate.

She said:

No bird has ever had any need

to qualify such misjudgments.

***

Exiting Tennessee,

we cross the De Soto Bridge

into Arkansas.

Exiting Memphis,

we cross the De Soto Bridge

into West Memphis.

Mississippi River seagulls

welcomed us across the border.

They guano-ed the windshield.

***

Paul Oliverio

 

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Footnotes

GOM: THE NOVEL is the copyrighted property of LCSoL. 

GOM =  GodFather of Math.

Chapter 2 is  here.

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You Will Sprain Your Sanity [HKu #29]

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Jump not too high for joy:
The brighter the moon,
the darker the backside. 

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Footnotes

YOU WILL SPRAIN YOUR SANITY

is the copyrighted property of LCSoL.

The next GoFather Haiku page is
here. 

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With Stunning View Of Mount Calvary + Ivy League Scholarships

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MATHUSALEM

North of Bethlehem

south of Sweden

west of Wisconsin

very west

Very biblical:

from whence comes

The Book of Numbers

If Einstein were there,
he would be a commoner

Known as "Freakville" 

because no student says

I hate Algebra

Pointing to Mt. Calvary

they look up and say

That is not a crucifix,

it is a plus sign 

Paul Oliverio 

 

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Footnote

MATHUSALEM is the copyrighted property

of the Lewis Carroll School of Logic. 
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CarPeo Set Piece ... [#41] ... Our Christmas Lunch

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The photographer was surprised

that the woman at the next table

ate only half her dish.

But the truth was

the couple that had sat there

was seated outdoors

temporarily

He wore glasses

and probably one of them

smoked a cigaret
to add another course
to their meal

The woman, upon return,

left not a drop of food

in her plate

Understandably:

Thai District

is that good
(especially the fried potstickers)

The photographer

is the incomparable

Mrs. Oliverio

For Christmas dinner,
she cooked up 
spaghetti a la delicioso

THE NEXT cARpEO SET PIECE IS
HERE. 

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A Drooling Caucasian Quotes One Who Is Drooled Upon

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For black people, being around white people 

is sometimes like taking care of babies

you don’t like, babies who throw up on you

again and again, but whom you cannot punish, 

because they’re babies. 

Eventually, you direct that anger at yourself—

it has nowhere else to go.

Hilton Als

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Rest In Peace, Carrie Fisher, Your Are Eternally Quotable

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Sometimes I feel like I've got my nose 

pressed up against the window of a bakery, 

only I'm the bread.

Carrie Fisher
 

born: 10/21/56

died: 12/27/16

I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go,
I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight,
strangled by my own bra.

Oh! This’ll impress you: I’m actually in
the Abnormal Psychology textbook.
Obviously my family is so proud.
Keep in mind though, I’m a PEZ dispenser
and I’m in the abnormal Psychology textbook.
Who says you can’t have it all? 

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The Non-Haiku [HKu #28]

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I tried to avoid writing
one more haiku but
I failed to do so.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Footnotes

THE NON-HAIKU

is the copyrighted property of LCSoL.

The next GoFather Haiku page is
here. 

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Father Forgive Me For Not Posting This Last Night

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'Twas the night before,
 the night before Christmas,
 and all through the house,

 not a creature was stirring
 Paul's Starbucks coffee,
(since he drinks it black
  and to the rimtop of the cup).
  When up on the rooftop did appear
  Paul with his tarp gear.

  No presents, no reindeer.
  So he was snug with his
  nightcap, er, in his nightcap
  when the winds did reappear,
  and he said, when the plants
  blew down for the second time,

"that's not our problem, dear."
  

As visions of future sugarless coffees
  danced in his head.

  

  Mrs. CarPeo

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Father Forgive Me But Never Before Have I Seen This Image

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Nor did I know anything about
Leonor Fini  until today but
this Argentinian-born  Italian artist
will never be forgotten.

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For The Birds and All Other Living Things ... [ pST #3]

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© Oliverio
Oops: I forgot to label the sky

BUT
I will remember
to wish Everyone
who reads this
MERRY CHRISTMAS
and Happy 
everything else

The next
Superimposed Text page
[ pST #4] 
is
here.

p = Photoverio 

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A Poem About Poetry ... From New Yorker Magazine

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FISHING AROUND

Keeping his feet, a feeling in his gut,
Heart in his mouth, a slow bee in his bonnet,
Silently groaning under God knows what,
He wants to see if he can write a sonnet:
Nothing spectacular, just some decent verse,
Each phoneme brooded on, each syllable weighed,
The diction plain, the sentence fairly terse
(To please you, lovely reader, meter-made).
 
And now he feels he’s in his element,
Baiting a hook and casting forth the line,
And through clear water sees a heaven-sent
Swift flash of silver rise into air and shine.
Ah, let it go—go, dart back to the deep.
A lovely thing, but much too small to keep.

Robert Mezey 

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Photographs Of The Year ... With Hyperlink And Without Caption

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The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

(Plus Many Many More)

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Keying In On O'Keeffe With Georgia (+Brooklyn) On Their Mind

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Reynolda House Museum of American Art
conservation staff check the condition of
Georgia O'Keeffe's Pool in the Woods, Lake George, 
after it came home recently from 
the Tate Modern's blockbuster retrospective
on O'Keeffe and before it
heads out again to be part of
an upcoming Brooklyn exhibition.

Art Daily

12/21/16

    Best Photos Of The Day

     
Caption is verbatim

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CarPeo Set Piece ... [#40] ... It Plugs Into The Earth

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© Oliverio

Cable Roots

of the Transparencia Flower

The next Carpeo Set Piece is
here.

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Rock Climbing In Viet Nam In 1995

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We enter a rock passage. 

They show us Buddhist shrines

set in big, high-ceilinged caves

inside the  Marble Mountain.

They point out how the light hits

the Buddhas through large holes 

in the mountains.

I say that it must have been 

quite an engineering feat,

getting those holes over the caves

in such a way that the light would fall

so precisely and prettily

on the Lord Buddha.

One of the tour guides smiles

(Why is everybody in this country

smiling at me all the time?

Have they no memory?)

and says I have it backward.

The holes in the mountain were made

by American bombs dropped

from airplanes.

Every place a bomb created a cave,

the Vietnamese built a shrine.

Linda Ellerbee

Take Big Bites

If you do not know 
who Linda Ellerbee is,
suffices to say that if there were
a  Mt. Rushmore of women
in TV newscasting,
it would include her. 

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The 75th Bullet: It's Only Natural

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Like all good dairy products,
the milk of human kindness
has an expiration date.

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 Footnotes

THE 75th BULLET  is the copyrighted property of  LCSoL.

Only the first 45 Bullets are linked together
because we do not want to make life easy
for our favorite thieves.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

CarPeo Set Piece ... [#39] ... With Superimposed And Pompous Text

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© Oliverio 

Truncated and Inverted
[ pST #2]

But the un-inverted image
is  here.

I could have called it
"Ice Cream Cone Architecture"
but upright, it made me think
of a tall thin pine tree.  

The next
CarPeo Set Piece
is
here. 

The next
Superimposed Text page
[ pST #3]
is
there.

p = Photoverio

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Rockin' n' Rollin' At The Big House On The Corner ... [ pST #1]

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⬆︎

THIS BIG HOUSE 
(and its history)
is better understood
by listening to 
THAT SONG 

⬇︎

The next
Superimposed Text page
[ pST #2]
is
here.

p = Photoverio

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CarPeo Set Piece ... [#38] ... Maple Moment w/Cheap Pun

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© Oliverio 

Oleaferio: 
Approaching the Border 

The next
CarPeo Set Piece
is
here. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________
    
    

Mired And Married Kama Sutra (Comic Relief #1509)

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 When the man and woman have eaten Indian food
and are too swollen with rice to make
conversation, let alone love, it is
"The Beaching of the Whales."

New Yorker
September 24, 2012 

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Bob Dylan's Nobel Acceptance Speech

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Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight. 

I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I’ve been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.
 
I don’t know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It’s probably buried so deep that they don’t even know it’s there.
 
If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn’t anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.
 
I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken, not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”
 
When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffeehouses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. 

If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.
 
Well, I’ve been doing what I set out to do for a long time now. I’ve made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it’s my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seem to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures, and I’m grateful for that.
 
But there’s one thing I must say. As a performer I’ve played for 50,000 people and I’ve played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. 

Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. 

The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.
 
But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years.
 
Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?” 

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.
 
My best wishes to you all, 
Bob Dylan
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This Is Not ... This Is ... [TIN/TI #35]

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  ⬆⬆ 

THIS IS NOT 
a picture of bread.

THIS IS
a picture of bread.

 ⬇⬇

The first image
is an 2016 Oliverio photograph
 of a brick sculpture
bordering a fountain,
somewhere in downtown
Long Beach.

The second image

was photographed by

WILLIAM EGGLESTON

who did not have to limit his genius

to Black and White photography!

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CarPeo Set Piece ... [#37] ... Entrance To The Sky Palm Forest

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© Oliverio 
a/k/a
Photoverio #226

The next
CarPeo Set Piece
is
here. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Footnote
The only difference between the Photoverio sequence
and the © Oliverio CarPeo Set Piece sequence
is the former sequence involves photography
pre-dating Mrs. CarPeo's Californication.

Also, ALL of the CarPeo Set Piece
photographs are linked together. 

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The Constant Temptation Of A Novel Reader

________________________________________________________________________________________________

It is a constant temptation to ransack novels for scenes,

themes and characters which may have originals 

in the author's life. 

The danger is that we may have come 

to believe that the connections are more direct

than they often are and that we thereby ignore 

the transforming effect of imagination.

Max Saunders

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Footnote

The quote is from the introduction to 

THE GOOD SOLDIER

by Ford Madox Ford.

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A Mind Superior To Mine Reacts To Donald Trump

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When I think Trump, I instinctively summon Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry  of 1926 – adapted in  a brilliant film  starring Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons in 1960, and after this US election I wouldn’t be surprised if a modern director was inclined to a remake. 

The eponymous antihero is a hypocrite and a conman. He has a patchy sexual past and a history of heavy drinking, yet sells himself as a convert to evangelical religion, teaming up with Sister Sharon Falconer, who leads impassioned revivals throughout the midwest. Manipulative and cunning, Gantry is driven to accrue wealth through religious hucksterism, but also power; he feeds off the roar of the crowd. He’s a narcissist and a fraud who has left multiple ruined lives in his wake.
 
The main difference between Gantry and Trump is that Gantry is portrayed as genuinely charismatic. Lewis’s preacher gets his leg over figuratively and literally because, as a performer, he’s mesmerising. Trump is not charismatic. He is artless and politically clumsy, and wears his egotism on his sleeve. Nor is Trump mesmerising, except in the sense that a train wreck is mesmerising. Gantry’s success in pulling the wool over people’s eyes is understandable: he has a silver tongue, and on stage he’s larger than life. Trump can’t string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium he is lumpen and awkward. As a fictional character, Gantry works, and Trump doesn’t. As Mark Schorer, an American academic, observed: “The forces of social good and enlightenment as presented in Elmer Gantry are not strong enough to offer any real resistance to the forces of social evil and banality.”
Some things never change.

Lionel Shriver

  

The next Trump page is
here. 

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