DoD-Ag Campus Starts New Professional Association!

We here in the DoD are pleased to announce the creation of a new professional association (taking “association” and “professional” and indeed all words loosely of course). 

Operating out of the DoD’s satellite Ag campus, the new group was founded after discovery* that academia is full of seedy sorts who don’t fit easily in The Club and could use a club of their own.  After long deliberations about what words might combine to make a cool acronym and yet could still be used in polite company, we named the new group the Society for Countrified Academics in Town – i.e., SCAT.  Here, then, are all the heady details.

SCAT Membership Requirements 

None really.  We don’t care who you are, town or country, but are pretty convinced that whoever you are it’s probably a lot more interesting than a regulation-issue academic persona permits you to freely express.

SCAT Mission

None really.  Except perhaps to affirm that most missions are best lightly held.  Otherwise you’ll get really frustrated when you head off on a mission and the truck won’t start again. 

SCAT Governance

We don’t really have any governance to speak of.  But we do bestow special honors for those who can pass the following quiz.

If I told you that Coca-cola can work both to get crud off your engine batteries and remove staining from toilet bowls, what would you say?

a)    That’s exactly why we shouldn’t drink Coke.  Just imagine what it does to your innards and teeth!

b)    Well, that sounds promising, but if it didn’t work, what a shameful waste of a good Coke.

SCAT Don’t-Call-Them-Meetings

All club “meetings” (but lord, don’t actually call them that!) shall be held in any of the following locations:

           

-Setting on a porch, any will do

-Anyplace two trucks pass in the lane and the drivers roll down their windows to share a few words

-At any parts counter, hardware store, machine shop, or any diner where the coffee costs less than two dollars and refills are free

-Over home-cooked food lovingly prepared out of highly processed or at least biblically justified delicious ingredients

-Anywhere and everywhere disaster strikes a member and a good casserole or some extra muscle would prove useful

To be absolutely clear, don’t-call-them-meetings do not require any actual conversation, much less (god forbid) an agenda.  They can also be held in silence, particularly if it’s an especially fine day that needs our full attention to appreciate. 

Things We Incline Against

Talk of pedigrees.  This is a professional association, not a puppy mill.

Rankings of persons, places, and things.  Though we do encourage a heated competitive atmosphere for tall tales about Darwin Award worthy doings involving heavy machinery and power tools.  And getting struck by lightning and living through it. 

Loving Walden, though this isn’t a hill we’d die on or anything.

Things We Could Almost Have But Don’t

If we did have a founding father (which we don’t) and we weren’t afraid of him (which we are, even though he’s dead), we’d pick Johnny Pentecost since he exemplifies the art of giving fewer damns.

We were tempted to have a logo and considered a coat of arms featuring a crossed pen and spade, but then asked ourselves:  What the hell would we put that on?  It’s not like we’re commissioning stationary or anything.

We’ve always been mildly attracted by the classy “elite” effect of gargoyles, but have settled instead for some inbred farm dogs.  They don’t move much and are impressively ugly, so we figure they’ll easily pass as nigh gothic architectural flourishes.  We’re all about things nigh around here. 

Things We Do Have and Plan to Keep

This goat skull mascot with baton stopper eyes.  Because even though we don’t need a mascot, we sure do like this goat skull and think it deserves a formal role in SCAT, however arbitrary.

This collection of truck mirrors for when SCAT members need to make sure their dirt necklaces are hanging straight

 A Bad-Day-in-Academia SCAT Dirge we sing off key when times get tough. 

Attitude.  In fact, multiple attitudes, often conflicting and yet still held all at once.

*After this published, I’ve received a lot feedback from others who wear chicken scat in academia.  Several elements of the above are inspired by things people sent me.

Funding Opportunities and Award Competitions

It's that time of year again, that time when competition season heats up for various prizes, awards, and fellowship opportunities.  As always, we provide here a list of the possible riches that could be yours. So sharpen your pencils, crack your knuckles, and go out there and WIN, Deviants! 

Using an Ox Cleaver to Kill a Chicken Prize [1]. Deadline: Sept 15.

This award is granted annually to the book review that shows the least mercy and most unreserved glee in shredding the modest philosophical work of others.  So if you have a book review that engages in wild overkill and, better yet, conveys your superior intelligence in brutal blood-letting fashion, send your submission now!

Four in the Morning and Three at Night Fellowship [2].  Deadline:  Oct 2 (or Nov 8 or Dec 12 – whatever makes you happy since it’s all arbitrary anyway)

This one-year fellowship is granted to support work that cheers and impresses other scholars while cleverly declining to offer anything substantively new or different.  Successful proposals should leave everything intellectually just as it is, yet create the happy impression that they have offered novel innovation.

Questions which Tend not Toward Edification Fellowship [3].  Deadline:  Nov 10.

This fellowship is awarded to that work which most successfully dodges all real human struggle and problems by taking the least urgent, most abstract, and utterly obtuse speculative endeavor as a totalizing, life-governing obsession.  Scholars submitting proposals for this fellowship, be warned:  Unless you have devoted years of so-far-fruitless labor to compiling extensive notes that will almost certainly never yield any identifiable human good, this is not the fellowship for you.  I.e., competition for this fellowship is especially fierce.

Climbing Trees in Search of Fish Fellowship [4].  Deadline:  Dec 1.

This fellowship is granted annually to that “mainstream” and “western” philosophical work that fulfills two key desiderata:  1) The work must avidly and energetically seeks to address a question historically neglected by the “mainstream,” and 2) the work must ignore vast – nay, mountainous! – heaps of work on the question pursued in “non-mainstream” and “non-western” literatures.  Successful projects will heroically ignore whole territories of human inquiry in favor of retrieving the tiniest scraps of possibility from recognized and thus reputable “western” and “mainstream” sources.

Uncarved Block Prize [5].  Deadline:  Dec 1.

In the interest of promoting “diversity,” this award is granted annually to work that engages the “non-mainstream” and “non-western” while simultaneously bundling everything that might be so described into one amorphous blob.  Successful proposals should mistake Buddhists for Daoists, India for Japan, and make free reference to fortune cookies while discussing Confucianism.  NB for the unaware:  All past successful proposals have utilized the phrase “The One” wantonly, so if you apply, make sure to go there.

Notes for the curious:

[1] Phrasing from Analects 17.4, in which Confucius snobbishly insults an overeager, too ambitious musical performance heard in the provinces.

[2] Zhuangzi, Chapter 2:  “When the monkey trainer was passing out nuts he said, ‘You get three in the morning and four at night.’ The monkeys were all angry.  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you get four in the morning and three at night.’  The monkeys were all pleased.  With no loss in name or substance, he made use of their joy and anger because he went along with them.” (Trans. A.C. Graham)

[3] Phrasing from the Buddhist text, “The Lesser Mâlunkyâputta Sutta.”

[4] Phrasing from Mengzi’s critique of rulers who insist on moral posturing and punitive measures while the common people labor in poverty and deprivation (Mengzi 1A17).

[5] Phrasing employed in “Daoist” sources, Laozi (Daodejing) and Zhuangzi. 

Deviant Therapeutics

We here at the DoD are enamored of archaic sources that provide shorthand techniques for coping with the travails of life.

Some of these are purposeful, self-consciously mantra-like statements that function to re-set attitude, emotion, or reaction, as when the Dhammapada suggests encountering enmity with the statement: “We here are struggling.”  Apart from being a finely apt representation of just about every human experience, this has to be one of the finest uses of “we” we have ever beheld. 

Some of these techniques are embedded in wider arguments but have a catchy therapeutic punch that begs to be made a mental refuge, as when Zhuangzi registers the sagely capacity for subtle adaptation to circumstance with the injunction: “Out in the world, follow its rules.”  In this he remarks an internal freedom that need not bother itself with frustration and resistance to things that likely don’t matter much.

And some of them work on us via humor, providing relief by asserting one’s ability to laugh at that which annoys, upsets, or bothers, as when Seneca suggests greeting Fortuna’s dirty tricks with the bold claim:  “You have to deal with a man!”  We confess that, not being a man ourselves, this is one of our favorites.  Indeed, we revel most in announcing it, along with raising a fist to the heavens, as something of a ritual prelude to changing flat tires, an activity in which we excel.  (True, Seneca wasn’t trying to be funny, but we never let that stop our finding him so.)

And, finally, since our childhood involved playing cops and robbers (and always being the robbers) more than was likely healthy, we have a mantra preserved from childhood, from that esteemed source Mad Magazine.  It serves as our go-to mental recitation upon encountering the Normal border control agents, those boundary police ever ready to catch us out in deviance:  “Cheese it, Rocko, it’s the fuzz!”  This allows us to enjoy our intellectual naughtiness almost as much as playing robbers. 

DoD Re-Vamp (Spoiler Alert: We’re still not Normal!)

We here in the DoD are ever trying to expand our compass when looking to know more things.  Consequently, there’s nothing we love more than a good re-vamp.  So we’re having one. 

We’ve decided to partner with even more folks and journals who are Deviant like us.  That means Deviance will get even bigger!  And we’re going to make more forms of Deviance interlock with other forms of Deviance, so expect us to be networked across platforms of time and space and human experience.  Truly, you won’t escape us!  Stay tuned for lots of updates and more Deviance than a body can stand.

For those hoping we were going to get really adventurous and head off past where the maps end – you know, into Normal territories – sorry.  There be dragons!