Recent content on jeffrey moro
1. Thomas Jefferson began keeping a weather diary on July 1st, 1776, while in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress. He had finished writing the lion’s share of the Declaration of Independence two days before. He was renting the second floor of 700 Market Street, a red brick three-story house constructed a year earlier. The diary at first comprised only three columns: the day, the…
I am writing this blog post on a 2023 Mac Studio with an M2 Max processor chip and 32 GB of RAM. Compared with the first laptop I owned, a 2009 unibody Macbook Pro with a Core2Duo processor chip and 2 GB of RAM (which I upgraded myself to 4 GB back when you could still do that sort of thing in a laptop), my current machine is somewhere between ten and three hundred times more powerful, depending…
John Cage wrote: “I am here, and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” Except he didn’t write it like that. He wrote it in four columns, the words and punctuations spaced out so as to guide the rhythm of speech. “I am…
I write to you, dear reader, ensconced in only the finest of Ikea-branded blankets, Vitmossas and Lapptågs alike, sinking deeper into the right angle of my chaise couch, a cardboard box filled with tissues on the ground below me (best to keep the powder room wastebaskets in the power rooms), sick – as the poets say – as a dog. I have been overdue for a good wallopping. There are worse…
24. F major Fuck ass key. Like running across flat ground and then tripping on a little rock. Very clearly for brass instruments. Unsubtle and boorish. 23. G major ooooh look at me I’m G majorrrrrr I’m just as boring as C major but I try to stand out with my extra little sharp aren’t I dainty aren’t I demure fuck OFF 22. C♯ minor Here’s the thing about C♯ minor. When…
The late twelfth century was hard on Kyoto. On the twenty-eighth day of the Fourth Month, in the year Angen 3, a fire broke out in a ramshackle brothel in the southeast of the city, at the intersection of Higuchi Street and Tominokōji Street. Wind whipped the fire into a blaze, cutting a clear line of smoke and ash to the Suzaku Gate in the northeast. One third of Kyoto burned: the fire took down…
Good afternoon Moronators. Class is not in session (UMD is blessedly still off for a few weeks yet). We are seven days into the new year and so much has already happened. We are at war(?) with Venezuela(??) or Greenland(???). My best friends had a baby (her name is Dorothy) (the baby, not my best friends) (although soon the baby will be my best friend too). My cat has learned how to jump onto the…
It’s no secret that the Phones are Bad. We all know this. Some of us are able to bracket the deleterious psychologiacl effects of Phone and get on with our days. I applaud them, but I am not one of them. Some of us (me) are not so well-equipped. For some of us (me), Phone offers a bottomless abyss of distraction and temptation, a simulacrum of social participation and knowledge acquisition,…
The low sweep of the Georgia coast looks at first as though a long war between land and sea has come to an uneasy truce. Each front has gained on the other until distinctions no longer hold, leaving exclaves and enclaves like a Balkan border: brackish pools and miniature lakes shape the negative space of a latticework of grass; above, crows and herons and turkey vultures prowl for their catch of…
You want your feet on the ground. I see too many people at my gym forget this part. They’ll have just their toes or the balls of their feet on the ground, but not the whole thing, not the heel. Full, flush contact, feet pulled back as far as they will go. There are some variations in which you might take them off the ground: I’ve seen folks brace them up on the bench itself, even. But…
I have been derelict in writing these past few weeks, to no small shame given that I got through two posts of this blog slash newsletter slash thing and immediately fell off the wagon. Mea culpa. My excuse: that I have been packing up my life in DC and moving it, after months of stops and starts, to Baltimore. We’re mostly unpacked. The cat is unfazed. I have spent more money than I thought…
When we bought the house, one half of a two-story duplex in north Baltimore (the stage left half), we thought the floors on the first level were pine. Up the stairs and into the second level ran grey carpet, wall-to-wall. We would have it removed, we said. We didn’t know what was underneath; the inspector suggested generic subfloor and we didn’t know enough to disagree. Homeownership,…
“The temperature’s rising,” Brian Eno sang. Out of the ten tracks on Eno’s debut solo record Here Come the Warm Jets , released in 1974, the third track, “Baby’s on Fire,” has always held me hypnotized. The song’s “plot,” such as it is: an unnamed woman on fire, papped by giggling onlookers, Eno crooning out her plight with a barely…
I haven’t kept a regular blog for several years now. There are many reasons for this, many macro, others micro. The macro ones you know about: they’re all the same reasons you’ve felt distracted, on edge, tired for much of the past few years. At least, I suspect you have. If you’re the kind of person taking the time to read a blog post (a quaint medium: I just as well might…
On April 1st, 2022, I defended my dissertation, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination,” and became a doctor. Below is the text of the talk I gave at the top of my defense, which explores the project’s argument, context, and next steps. Friends, family, esteemed colleagues: I am proud to welcome you to the defense of my doctoral dissertation,…
Earlier today, a friend asked me how I write. Not like, existentially or anything (although it’s a challenge these days!), more my workflows for writing. Since they’re not the first to ask this, and since I went ahead and wrote it up for them, I thought I might as well post it on here for anyone else interested in workflows that incorporate plain text, citation integrations, and…
Thesis: abolish cop shit in the classroom. For the purposes of this post, I define “cop shit” as “any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers.” Here are some examples: ed-tech that tracks our students’ every move plagiarism detection software militant tardy or absence policies, particularly ones that…
1. The problem with bringing back blogs is that Twitter is still the distribution platform. I never bothered to put analytics on this website, because to do so would be to give Google the ability to further spy on my readers and that kind of defeats the purpose of blogging in 2k20? It’s sort of like becoming a vegan and then exclusively eating vegetables from mega-corporate farms, or getting…
There comes a time in a doctoral student’s life wherein they have to qualify to keep going on toward a dissertation. Usually it takes the form of an exam on a comprehensive list of materials. I find these lists useful and interesting not only for how they frame a field of inquiry for a person’s diss, but also how they function as snapshots of what academia looked like for a particular…