iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If you're in Aberdeen in February, Aidan O'Rourke's programme for Delve is the most exciting set of events I've seen in ages (and seemingly tailored to be exactly to my taste, so I hope other people come too!): www.aberdeenperformingarts.com/delve/

aberdeenperformingarts.com

Delve | Aberdeen Performing Arts

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

In 1998 I read a Guardian review of Saint Etienne’s Good Humor and it sounded so much like my kind of thing I walked straight to the record shop. Tonight I saw their final Scottish gig and it was an absolute joy. Feeling nostalgic, but also like I’m 19 and the world’s beginning.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Wait, is the Maggie Nelson who is Annie Dillard's literary executor, you know, actual Maggie Nelson?! Because what now?!

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huck mason @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

rip annie dillard

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Christmas 1977 my uncle gave my mother a copy of Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm. It is the book in which I keep my mother's memorial prayer cards, the item I would first save in a house fire, because those pages, turned by my mother and I, are one of the closest connections I have to her.

The first edition of Holy the firm. On a beige background are mirrored images of a phoenix rising from, or descending from, a fire.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Why, ask managers up and down the land, would we want to preserve or critique our history and culture?

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Has any canonical poet had as big a glow-up as Frost between A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914)?

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Got new glasses for the first time in seven years and now I know how dirty my floors are. Huge mistake.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm slowly working my way through The Collected Poems of Alexander Scott, and really like 'The lipperan-lapperan lick o the sea' as an opening line. (Scott is not high on my radar, and there's some really great stuff here.)

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

iPlayer getting rid of the 'most recent' sorting for films is the worst thing to happen to my viewing since MUBI stopped having only 30 films at a time. I don't want a big library organised by popularity! I want a small selection of oddities I have to watch within 30 days or lose the chance forever!

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I thought the 'AI might kill us all' stories were doom-mongering, but if I have to attend any more meetings about AI in education they might finish me off.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I'll be re-reading a lot of Josephine Tey in the next few weeks for a thing. Starting tonight with The Man in the Queue, and is there a better name for a minor character in literature than Ray Marcable?

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I'm watching Superman II for the first time, and it is so much dumber, and so much more delightful, than I anticipated. But mainly I love everything Reeve wears as Clark Kent.

Black and white picture of Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent in a shirt and ribbed cardigan with a wide collar, holding his spectacles in his hand.

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Scott Lyall @scottlyall.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

We should read, analyse and celebrate Violet Jacob's manifold work - poet, novelist, short-story writer, diarist, artist - so much more than we do currently in Scotland.

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CrimethInc. Ex-Workers' Collective @crimethinc.com · 01/09/2026

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. —Wendell Berry

An image from 2023 showing a stretch of Weelaunee Forest destroyed to make way for the construction of a police militarization facility known as Cop City>

From this article: https://crimethinc.com/2023/09/05/understanding-the-rico-charges-in-atlanta-a-sweeping-indictment-seeks-to-criminalize-protest-itself

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

My PhD was originally going to be a comparative study between Wendell Berry and George Mackay Brown (and ended up being solely on the latter), but more than an academic interest, Berry's books were genuinely formative. His essays weren't just some of the first adult non-fiction I read;

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

The bar for 2026 surprises is low, but 'the new Tom Hardy album is legitimately good' is one of the more pleasant ones.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Imagine if the online folks who get in a tizzy about specialised humanities courses had to read the action plans/working group reports/etc that many academics spend most of their time writing. Niche research for a readership of, mostly, no one at all.

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KJ Shepherd @kjshepherd.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

there will be many ways to celebrate dolly parton and the one I want to point out is that she was a friend of Miss Piggy

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Lambchop's Punching the Clown is probably the most beautiful album of the year, and also the best Justin Vernon-related project in ages.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

If you’re wondering who could possibly be eating Christmas biscuits when they hit the shelves in August - it’s me.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

There's something so radical about Sara Baume's Opening Night that it makes everything I've read since seem a little flatter by comparison. It's a book that seems so straightforward, and I think is now hiding away in the back of my brain, reorganising how I think writing works.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

My Outlook just autocorrected 'painfree' to 'tpainfree', and this is very much the highlight of my workday.

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

None of this shit is worth our lives.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Top tip for safely viewing the solar eclipse: live somewhere really cloudy. Sigh.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Today was Cairns Craig's funeral, and it's strange that he's been such a constant figure in my academic career that it's only now that the loss is hitting me. Cairns gave the first lecture on Scottish Lit I remember attending (on Edwin Morgan). www.iash.ed.ac.uk/news/profess...

iash.ed.ac.uk

Professor Cairns Craig (1949-2026) | IASH

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

There's a funeral on campus today for a long-retired academic, and I just met a former student of theirs who'd travelled some way to get here, having been taught by this lecturer in 1966, and I'm really touched.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

What if I developed a big crush on Rock Hudson? What then?!

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Great to see the Guardian champion the SHAPE (Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) subjects, but this piece gives impression that they are expensive, whereas many are 'cheap to teach' subjects subsidising more expensive subjects, mainly in STEM and medicine. The crisis demands better understanding.

theguardian.com

The Guardian view on humanities cuts in universities: academic departments are more than cost centres | Editorial

Editorial: Literature, the arts and social sciences must not be sacrificed as higher education funding is squeezed

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Resetting the pressure on your boiler might not seem like the sort of task that'd lead to self-congratulatory posts, but my boiler is apparently so old there are no instructions for an even vaguely similar model on the internet, so that was a tense twenty minutes of experimentation.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I'm spending my evening reading Albert Murray for the first time (The Omni-Americans, which is brilliant) and listening to Napalm Death for the first time (the new Tiny Desk concert), and this world contains multitudes.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Petitioning my body to forget the score.

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

In perhaps our most devastating briefing we find early career staff in the humanities as a whole have declined by 20% since 2016/17. Between 23/24 and 24/25 early career staff across all SHAPE subject areas fell by 6%, (from 52,795 to 49,410 FPE). That is the pipeline for our disciplines

The British Academy
Mapping SHAPE academic staff briefing:
Pathways for early career
SHAPE
academics are in decline

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Random Scottish music recommendation: the first single by Peplo, which has 25 views on YouTube and is pretty great. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyI0...

youtube.com

For His Better Three Quarters

YouTube video by Peplo - Topic

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

It's kind of embarrassing how excited I am whenever anyone in the public sphere acknowledges what's going on in my sector.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

One of the less-acknowledged consequences of widespread student AI use is breaking down trust between teacher and student. (Some) students perceive their job as being to fool their teachers; (some) teachers perceive their job as being to catch their students.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Very deep in spreadsheets of doom, and desperate to use my literary brain, I went to the library, picked up a volume of poetry by a poet I'd not heard of, and which had no information on the cover, and am reading it completely devoid of any context. It's super fun.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Your annual reminder that wheelchair doubles is by far the most exciting tennis played at Wimbledon. (I love watching the smaller courts in week two in general.)

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Orkney Library & Archive @orkneylibrary.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

This is your occasional reminder that Agatha Christie wasn't just the bestselling crime writer of all time but also she had a surfboard called Fred

A black and white photograph of Agatha Christie as a young woman standing on a beach in front of a surfboard which has the name Fred written on it.

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Shepseskare in Love @upfromsumdirt.blacksky.app · 07/07/2026

leonora carrington THE HEARING TRUMPET

At times I had thought of writing poetry myself but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them neatly together without looking in shop windows. There are so many words, and they all mean something.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Having one of those days where everything about modern life, particularly in relation to universities, seems completely catastrophic and really wondering if I made the right choices 25 years ago.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Obviously the humanities are for everyone, but sitting at graduation today I was so proud that there is still a place for queer/neurodivergent/awkward/etc students. So much university rhetoric is focused on what students can do, and I mainly want to see who they can be.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Reading a novel set in 1911 and they're drinking Whitman's Instantaneous Cocoa, and I don't know why I find that so funny. (Maud Hart Lovelace's Carney's House Party, which is possibly the best representation of Vassar I've come across in fiction, and I've read a lot of them!)

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Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Is there a more instantly tantalising beginning to a book than the first page of the diaries of the Radnorshire clergyman Francis Kilvert, from the 1870s?

Tuesday, 8 February
From Wye Cliff to Pont Faen. Miss Child in great force. She showed me her clever drawings of horses and told me the adventures of the brown wood owl 'Ruth' which she took home from here last year. She wanted to call the owl 'Eve' but Mrs. Bridge said it should be called 'Ruth'. She and her sister stranded in London at night went to London Bridge hotel (having missed the last train) with little money and no luggage except the owl in a basket. The owl hooted all night in spite of their putting it up the chimney, before the looking glass, under the bedclothes, and in a circle of lighted candles which they hoped it would mistake for the sun. The owl went on hooting, upset the basket, got out and flew about the room.
The chambermaid almost frightened to death dared not come inside the door. Miss Child asked the waiter to get some mice for 'Ruth' but none could be got.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

I appreciate the previous reader of this library book using sticky notes with squirrels.

In the margin of an academic book is placed a thin grey sticky note depicting an upside down squirrel. The reader has written ‘why?’

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Stephen Shapiro @stephenshapiro.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

zeitung.faz.net/data/863/rea...

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

No week that ends with new singles from Phoebe Bridgers, Carly Rae Jepsen, and PJ Harvey can be all bad, much as this one has tried!

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Taking a break from administrative horrors to read, at last, Sinykin and Winant's Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (because sometimes you just have to do something with the teaching and research parts of your job), and yet seeing contributors there I know are now at risk of redundancy...

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