ABSTRACTS
George Simonson denies he is interested in eccentric photo
cropping, "clever" pictures or deliberate mystification.
"But you never know how or what the eye will see next,"
he notes. "In golf they say, 'Play the ball where it
lies.'"
The photo captions in the pop-ups below are excerpted from
"Dream Geography" and "Rameau's Niece"
in Gargantua en Acadie, an unfinished satirical
travelogue by George poking fun at science and convention.
more
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, and I am invited, indeed obliged if only to stay alive at speed, to keep my senses propped wide open moment by moment, as razor-fresh and Zenlike as a plate of raw oysters. Here, life is still largely unstained. The world, here, is still largely green and blue, and sweet and fierce, like the original world was and will be, and it remains even in the present era, still largely ungrumbling, a fit home (and school) to gay, wastrel humankind. '))
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 from the lacework of a two-foot mud puddle, the two hundred miles of the Amazon’s ever-branching delta and, for all we know, the meandering rivers of light and shadow of the Milky Way.'))
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, HARPSWELL, MAINE' , 'MYSELF to MYSELF: Curious, is it not, how the conversation of a man and a woman can shimmer, sounding the deeps between them one moment, it seems, and yet again sounding nothing the next, perhaps, as plain and shallow as a birdbath. How many times have I, the eternal He, imagined she and I were treading softly, discovering our shortcuts, striking now and then a choir of Chinese gongs in each other\’s heart-temple, as brilliant and bottomless as fireworks, only to discover afterward (by inspection, to be sure, for one cannot ask directly) that she, the eternal She, found our talk disagreeable perhaps or, worse and alas! more likely, as incidental as the chatter of the grocer\’s boy? And—<em>mon Dieu</em>—how many times have I done the same to Her? '))
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, but this did not discourage me from trying them eventually anyway. Similarly, I have no wish to discourage other people from trying modernity if that is what they want. I simply hope, for their sake, that it passes swiftly by, like the age of pimples and padded brassieres. Rationality (the mental slavery that is the “peculiar institution” of the modern age) is, after all, demonstrably incapable of solving life\’s deepest problems—Who am I? What is real? And so forth. It denies they can even be posed. Or do you imagine the enduring highwater goal of humankind should be to tinker, inventing ever better turnstiles and spray deodorants? '))
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 French distaste for the English, of the world’s universal distaste for its vulgarian touring guests, or possibly all three? Am I too vast and mastiff-magnificent for this stump of a man (who as a stump might instinctively detest dogs)? Is he simply a loyal French employee, perhaps, conscientiously enforcing bureaucracy\’s regulations in orderly defiance of all human frailty and disorder? Or is he just a wily peasant, feeling that because his establishment is not yet open it is somehow perfectly satisfactory, even preferable, to be unkind to his customers? Or possibly all six? So many questions, so little bladder. “<em>Merci beaucoup</em>,” I say with but the slightest edge to my bilabial plosive—and, snickering up a sleeve at life\’s instructive noncompliances, drive onward.'))
