Almost finished with incongruous babble

I knew I had found it! My followers were dropping like flies because of our endless blather! GingerV was suggested we should get our heads behind the camera and stop talking. Kerry was reminding us that all we needed was ONE shot...One. I think I had it. Of course, it wasn't from my hometown but from an Italy trip Karen and I took two or three years ago.

I ran downstairs to show it to Butler. Bagman was still all woo-wooed up (to bastardize a recent Obama saying) in Africa or Alaska with Dorothea.

Even Butler was getting tired of a week-long incongruous debate. So I just plopped the photo in front of him:

BUTLER: "Hmmm... white and black, soft and hard, natural and manmade... Yup. Very incongruous.

I was getting excited and blurted out, "Even more incongruous -- it wasn't shot in my hometown! It was in Venice. Italy, not California."

BUTLER: "I know where Venice is. A very incongruous city. So post it tomorrow and you're done."

My heart sank. I couldn't post it tomorrow because I had already posted it today. I fell sobbing across Butler's desk disrupting his pencil collection which he had spent hours placing in perfectly parallel relationships. "Oh, Butler! I blew it! I only have one and I posted it too early! And I don't have any time to shoot anything new! What can I do?"

BUTLER: "If Bagman was here, he'd tell you to just cheat. Post anything. Post a bunch of your old Venice shots. Your overactive ego has been looking for a chance to show them off. There are no rules that say it has to be in Charleston. Or recently taken. Just throw up anything. But for all our sakes, shut up.

"Well, I could claim that posting something irrelevant to the theme was, itself, incongruous,"
I suggested hopefully.

BUTLER: "Remember the part about shutting up?"

Oh NO! Not more babble about incongruity!!!

I have to confess I have been feeling guilty; because Bagman had been correct. I was seriously thinking of not posting any photographs for the Friday Hometown Shootout. I was feeling guilty because while I had genuinely confused myself by thinking way too much about incongruity, the real reason was that I was too lazy to shoot anything.

So this morning, I shot one picture and ran down to show it to Butler and Bagman. But Bagman was gone! Butler saw me and glanced from his computer to Bagman’s empty chair.

BUTLER: “He gave up on you. He said if you weren’t going to shoot anything for Friday, he was selling his camera and flying to Africa for the week to be with Dorothea. Or maybe it was Alaska.”

“But I did shoot something incongruous. Look at this!”

BUTLER: “Hmmm. Not your best work, that’s for sure. It’s a pretty mediocre picture. But I don’t see anything incongruous about it either.”

How could he not see it! I started explaining it to him: “Don’t you remember?! It was a ping pong table! But now we use it as a work table for matting and framing photographs!”

BUTLER: “That’s the best you could come up with? Nobody would even notice it?”

“Will would!” I blurted out, wondering for a moment if I should clarify that “Will would” referred to Barclay’s brother, William and was not a truncated declension of the subjective of the verb “to be”. And I fell, as usual, into a digression.

Will’s mother, Karen’s best friend, came two years ago to the College of Charleston and visited us often because he liked us…and of course he liked home-cooking and playing ping pong. He played on the table as much as he could. I think that beating me at ping pong became an obsession for him. I was his Moby Dick with a paddle and I was glad Bagman was not around to turn that into an off-color pun.

He played ping pong at school whenever he wasn’t studying, which was probably most of the time. Toward the end of last year he even won a game or two but never beat me two out of three before I took the table down.

“When I turned the table into a workbench Will was furious!” I told Butler, returning from my digression.

BUTLER: “Furious yes. Incongruous, no.”

“So what do you see?” I asked.

BUTLER: “I see rectangles and right angles, table, frames, mattes…geometrically similar. It is one of the most congruent photographs I’ve ever seen.”

“And what kind of photograph would you think was incongruous?” I asked.

BUTLER: “Something natural juxtaposed with something manmade.”

Usually Butler complicates things but this time it seemed simple and I thought of a photograph I had taken in Venice. I turned and ran back to my office to see if I could find it.

BUTLER (Calling after me): “You’re welcome!”

Incongruity Continued (a bit incongruously)

After walking the dogs (again) and the sun hadn’t come up yet, I entered the office and Bagman and Butler were already there. Bagman was sitting the easy chair covered with a pile of three cameras, two telephoto lenses, a tripod and a pile of brochures about the 10 hottest nude beaches in the world. Butler looked up from the computer where he had been googling congruity…say that five times fast. “Find out anything?” I asked.

BUTLER: “Not even any interesting Latin derivations. Lots of stuff about congruent triangles and polygons.

Bagman has begun tapping his large meaty fingers heavily on the small mahogany table next to the chair.

BUTLER: “Oh! But here’s a quotation from Alfred North Whitehead: ‘I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.’”

BAGMAN: “Like you’re doing right now.”

BUTLER (unfazed as usual): And Yahudi Menuhin: “Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.’”

BAGMAN: “Yahoo Yahudi…Can we just shut up and go take pictures?”

BUTLER: “Oh! That reminds me! The Menuhin quote! You had a question from GingerV in a comment on yesterday’s blog. She wanted to know more about your statement that as soon as you take a picture the composition of the photograph turns the incongruity of the subject into harmony. She writes: ‘I think I need to talk with you to know what this means - you are way ahead of me.’”

BAGMAN: “Ahead of her!! She thinks you’re ahead of her!! Maybe in the bullshit category!”

I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable and insulted but hold my tongue while Butler comes to my rescue.

BUTLER: “You should have more respect for our employer, Baggie.”

BAGMAN: “Employer? You really are a butt, Butt! Without us, he’d spend the whole day watching reruns of MASH.

BUTLER: “But he and Yahudi do have a point about the human mind, the subconscious ability to see or hear order in chaos. Jackson Pollack, for instance.”

BAGMAN: “Timothy Leary, for instance! A good dose of LSD and I could see the Universe in a dustball!”

BUTLER (finally losing it): “You dumb lusty sot! You’d see MISS Universe in a dustball with or without LSD!”

The sun hasn’t even come up yet and I’ve already given up on the day. Head down, I shuffle toward the exit to see if there are any reruns of MASH on cable.

Bagman starts to rise in anger but then suddenly has an intuition and slumps back in his chair totally defeated.

BAGMAN: “Oh, damn. I get it. We’re just gonna talk this thing to death and we’re not going to take any pictures at all, are we?”

Butler is ignoring him now and is back on the computer googling Yahudi. Another word pairing that is fun to say five times fast.