iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 8h

Yesterday I bought three bottles of Crystal. Today I watched Hellraiser for the first time in decades, and Chatterer was easily my favourite. This all checks out.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 9h

'Love is of the body; not the body, but of the body' - Forster, but probably also Barker. Now imagining a tv show in the style of The Trip called Morgan and Clive where they take a road trip together.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 12h

This is an excellent piece that captures what many (most?) of us think.

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 12h

'The world of [...] Deans receded illimitably. Water, sky, evergreens, a wind - these things not even the seasons can touch, and surely they lie beyond the intrusion of man?'

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 13h

Trying to recalibrate my belief in art by reading A Room with a View (for teaching) before watching Hellraiser (not for teaching, but I wish).

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Reposted by Timothy C. Baker

Association for Scottish Literature @asls.org.uk · 14h

Josephine Tey & the problem of time 20 Oct, Melrose. £6 Josephine Tey’s #crimefiction was unconventional in its portrayal of sexuality & its challenges to the norms of the genre, & also took unusual approaches to questions of time & space. Prof @timothycbaker.bsky.social investigates bit.ly/4yz79LL

bit.ly

JOSEPHINE TEY and the problem of time – Melrose Literary Society

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I admire my library catalogue's commitment to the bit.

Copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, with a library self issue receipt giving the title as 'Kidnapped : being memoirs of the adventures of David Balfour in the year 1751, how he was kidnapped and cast away, his sufferings in a desert isle, his journey in the wild Highlands, his acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites, with all that he suffered at the hands of his uncle Ebeenzer Balfour of Shaws, falsely so-called.'

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Timothy C. Baker @timothycbaker.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It’s a good sign when on Monday at 5:45am, despite a chill weekend, your first thought is ‘gosh it’s been a long week’, right?

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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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Reposted by Timothy C. Baker

the babahuck @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

(Not as a plug, but this week is the fourth anniversary of the book I wrote about my mother and reading, and next week would've been her birthday, and I talk about Dillard there, and today is just so sad.)

Cover of Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Animal Stories. A rabbit with long ears is in the foreground, another behind it, and behind that text from Watership Down.

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

I love (almost) all of her work, of course - there's no better piece of prose than her essay on the eclipse. But Holy the Firm is the book through which I see the world.

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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

Genuinely, is there an account that tells you what old movies aired on the BBC at 2am that you might want to catch up with?

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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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Reposted by Timothy C. Baker

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

his books were in the house because they'd provided a manual for how my parents chose to live their lives. I grew up in a world explicitly shaped by Berry's thoughts on farming and faith, on community and ethics. I am not surprised, but I am heartbroken.

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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

For 28 years Cairns has been one of the central voices in my understanding of what Scottish Literature is, and does. I'm just really grateful.

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

Aberdeen job I now have. He was always gracious when I argued against his work, as most scholars of my generation have done. He suggested me for a few commissioned pieces he didn't have time to do at the start of my career. He was also, at Aberdeen, my line manager until I became his, bizarrely.

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

(He also had a very funny joke about a Danny Boyle film I think of monthly.) When I felt stuck with my retail career in Boston, I wrote to him and asked about postgrad opportunities, and he welcomed me enthusiastically, and supervised a year of my PhD. Some years later he let me know about the

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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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