Timothy C. Baker

Sounds lovely!

Which one?

The fun thing about aging past Maxim de Winters over multiple rereadings of Rebecca is moving from 'patriarchal tyrant' to 'aw, he's just a wee guy!'
(Favourite detail on this reading: even Jasper's mum [the spaniel] doesn't get a name.)

Pocket universe filled only by items Evri claims to have delivered.

I’m watching Misery for the first time, and Kathy Bates is so aspirational. Cute neurodivergent literary critic who fights Trumpist patriarchal men? Sign me up!

Wheat paste poster that says the all the world is dying and the new world struggles to be born now is the time of monsters. There's a picture of Elmo

Morning walk

You gotta hand it to freshers' flu. When so much in life is uncertain, here it is, late September, and I've got the sniffles again.

Honestly, the best predictor of whether or not a novel moves from the Booker longlist to shortlist is if I haven't read it yet. (I've read the Miller, which is good! And own the Choi! But that's it.)
(But anyway, Sarah Hall's Helm is the book that most should be there.)

I'm not going on a much longer rant, because I don't want to give them the outrage they desire, but I am in the UK because of the Indefinite Leave to Remain scheme and want to stress that it is a) really (and unnecessarily) arduous and expensive, and b) a very good thing to have.

I've put this as required reading for two different cohorts of students within ten minutes of reading it.

Screenshot. King's College London page. Examples of effective practice The following scenarios follow the above guidelines and offer insights into ways that academic staff can use AI transparently and in an assistive capacity, always ensuring human oversight and judgment remain central. Scenario A – Scaling feedback while maintaining quality Lecturer A is responsible for marking over 100 essays within a two-week window. Conscious of the limitations this workload places on the depth of individual feedback, they adopt a hybrid approach using their university’s approved or supported LLM tool, Copilot. Without ever uploading student work directly, Lecturer A composes an anonymised summary for each student, noting which marking criteria were met and the approximate percentage achieved for each. They input this summary alongside the official rubric into Copilot, prompting it to generate supportive, criterion-referenced feedback. This feedback is then carefully reviewed, adapted, and personalised before being uploaded to the marking platform. Students are made aware of this process in advance and shown a demonstration, reinforcing transparency and trust.

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

This is my 19th autumn teaching in HE, and my start-of-term jitters are just as bad as they were in 2006.

Close-up of Garbo, in a negligee, with subtitle reading ‘I’ve never been so tired in my life’.

I’ve never liked the phrase ‘giving it 110%’, but I’m watching Grand Hotel, and Greta Garbo just acts MORE than any other human.

Oh, I am THERE! (It’s a small claim to fame, but I think I was the first academic to write on her, in an issue of C21 Literature that was never digitised and that I never received a contributor copy of!)

Also finished the new Sarah Moss today, and remembering my idea for a ‘Sarah, Sarah, Alison, Alison’ book (Hall, Moss, Kennedy, Smith) because I think they’re such human and humane authors but also understand that what fiction does is make language happen, and that that’s a small miracle.

It's been a while since I read a new novel that took so much sheer joy in language as Sarah Hall's Helm.

I'll quite happily maintain that if you don't like Eleanor Morton, there's something wrong with you.

Aberdeen's 60s are best represented by its cinemas:
1965: The Rolling Stones play the Capitol
1966: The Sound of Music plays at the Odeon for nine months, with coaches coming from Inverness
1967: Joseph Strick's Ulysses is one of the only films ever banned in the city.
@belmontcinema.bsky.social

Cover of the Aberdeen Bon-Accord and Northern Pictorial Holiday Number, showing a motorboat speeding along the Aberdeen Beach.

New favourite Aberdeen image, from 1932.

Reading a lot about UK cinema exhibition in the 1890s, and I think there's a genuine case to be made for Queen Victoria as the first British film star.

This is such a good statement, and ending it 'We regret that,
sadly, unanimity is not possible on this issue and kinder ground eludes us' is definitely language I want to use in the future.

Much of Tokyo Sonata hit /way/ too close to home, and it did lose its way 3/4 of the way through, but my word, that is one of the all-time best final scenes.

Happy leafblowers on campus season to the no one who celebrates!

Ooh, this is going to be great!

Two white men in red shirts (one bald and wearing dark trousers, one with long blond hair and wearing white trousers) gesture at a flip chart reading 'No Joy No Joy No Joy'.

University management preparing their start-of-term updates.

(Still actually from the new music video by The Beths. But still.)

There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the blight gets in.

What’s the best way to train young vampire hunters?
Garlic medium education.

I rarely get excited about architecture, but this is SO gorgeous.

I have a big soft spot for Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol, as well as the more renowned ones.

Never too old to have an office breakdown because Fake Plastic Trees comes on the radio.