Timothy C. Baker

I think lecturers who have to provide captioned lecture recordings should hold a prize for most 'ums' in a lecture. I hit 178 in 50 minutes today!

Why does anyone say it any other way?!

I propose to make universal the old policy of the Blackfriars conference at the American Shakespeare Center:

If you do not end your paper on time, you will be forced to exit, pursued by a bear. Literally, a bear will come take your paper from you.

This is now the only bit I'm committed to.

Such an essential part of my childhood, and how I learned to see the world. I'd find it genuinely shocking to see it go.

Jokes aside, what impressed me most this time was the narrative ambiguity. It reminded me most closely of Hogg’s Confessions in its determination to tell a story that resists being put in words.

I, too, spent the weekend reading Wuthering Heights. It’s quite good, no? Someone should adapt it sometime!

Teaching Sunset Song in the morning, going to a Mogwai gig in the evening. You really do just repeat the things you did in your twenties for the rest of your life, apparently.

I've gotten to the point where I'm cheered by a lighter grey.

There was blue in the sky, but I did not see the sun!

Lewis Grassic Gibbon on Aberdeen: 'far and near the gutters gurgled, eddied and swam, piercing down to a thousand drains, down through the latest Council diggings, down to dark spaces and forgotten pools...'. Truly the message is that it is not only the land, but Council roadworks, that endure.

Bleakness, not meanness or jollity, is the key to the Aberdonian character, not so much lack of the graces or graciousness of existence as lack of colour in either of these - Lewis Grassic Gibbon

There never was a sun - Me, channelling C.S. Lewis

This makes me so happy!

‘If I think about what this means, I want to cry’: what happens when a city loses its university? When Essex University’s Southend campus opened, it was a message of hope for a ‘left behind’ UK seaside town. Its closure will be felt far beyond its 800 students, some of whom will not get their degr...

Not just a university restructure but a coastal town losing its future.

Rally tomorrow, 12–1pm, The Forum, Elmer Square, Southend (SS1 1NS).

Be there.

It has rained every day for three weeks, and I have a bloody nose or cry every day, and I'm starting to feel like my life is an office-based reenactment of Our Wives Under the Sea, where gradually I am just merging with the watery world.

I get why people in the comments argue that disliking this process is just fetishising books, but there's something honestly really sucky about knowing that things I spent years writing were chopped up and discarded for... what? So a student could save ten minutes on an essay?

Coastal Gothic, 1719-2020 by Jimmy Packham

Delighted to receive the hard copy of Jimmy Packham’s fabulous Coastal Gothic, 1719-2020 from our Cambridge Elements in the Gothic
@dalegothic96.bsky.social
@jfpackham.bsky.social
@universitypress.cambridge.org

In the most contemporary lit lecture that's ever happened, I started my Scottish Lit lecture today talking about Ali Smith's Glyph, three days before its publication date. (I mean, just the short text used in advertising, but still!)

Finally started Riot Women and as someone squarely in the 'sad middle-aged English teacher who still thinks Hole are cool' camp, yeah, I get the appeal.

Curious how many of us in the ScotLit world have taught Morgan's Glasgow Sonnets many times (to varying student reception) without juxtaposing them with the instamatic poems from the same year, which are radically making me rethink what the sonnets do.

I know the point of those terrible DJT/US military and penguin posts is that we all know it's wrong and so talk about it, but I'm wondering if the echo of 'Paddington Leads QEII to Heaven' imagery is intended, and if the Antarctic setting is meant to make us think of At the Mountains of Madness.

Not at all. Mr Turner is his most traditionally beautiful.

The past few weeks have shifted from 'must finish She-Ra before it leaves streaming' to 'must finish She-Ra before the end of the world', but you know what, She-Ra is great.

Timothy C. Baker Queer Nostalgia and Island Time in J. M. Barrie and Compton Mackenzie Abstract Studies of queer temporality, both in Scottish literature and more generally, have emphasised the importance of non-linear time and questions of futurity. Scottish texts of the 1920s, however, present a different view, where the rejection of compulsory heterosexuality, at the very least, is historically situated. J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose (1920) juxtaposes multiple timelines to suggest the possibility of rejecting traditional family and gender relations, while Compton Mackenzie’s two portraits of queer life on Capri, Vestal Fire (1927) and Extraordinary Women (1928), present the international community there as located firmly in the past. Both authors specifically posit islands, real or fictional, as places of transformation and exploration. Islands not only have their own time, but a unique relation to questions of sexuality. While Barrie and Mackenzie’s texts, when discussed at all, are seen as fundamentally conservative and predominantly read in relation to the authors’ biographies, this article suggests that their overlooked status in current conversations about queer literature and history is itself productive. In both geographic and historical setting the works emphasise peripherality and non-integration. They are, following Lauren Berlant’s recent work, inconvenient texts, and texts about inconvenience. Taking such texts seriously, and emphasising the value of literature, and lives, that remain outliers, demonstrates new interpretive possibilities for the study of queer Scottish literature.

Queer Nostalgia & Island Time in JM Barrie & Compton Mackenzie
SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW 16/1 (2024)

@timothycbaker.bsky.social on Barrie’s MARY ROSE & Compton Mackenzie’s novels of queer life on Capri: VESTAL FIRE, & EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN
via @projectmuse.bsky.social
3/4
muse.jhu.edu/pub/243/arti...

Making the most of my time in Boston by devising a SMAAHT action plan (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Aspirational, Hypothetical, Tentative).

The costs of sector/nations-wide mass redundancies.

The conspiracy-minded part of me wonders if the consulting firms that advise on all these changes to university structures and teaching delivery, etc, have stakes in new education providers who will swoop in once existing universities collapse.

WEEKEND READING: What if, in trying to ‘fix’ universities, we are quietly unmaking them? - HEPI Join HEPI and Advance HE for a webinar onTuesday, 13 January 2026, from 11am to 12pm, exploring what higher education can learn from leadership approaches in other sectors. Sign up here to hear this a...

I can't stop think about about this article (thanks @elizabethelliott.bsky.social). I increasingly wonder how many senior managers in HE see the sector as thriving in thirty or fifty years, or if this is all a process of phasing out. www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/01/10/w...

Ooh! Me too! (Well, I had a three-hour meeting, a two-hour meeting, and a one-hour meeting on the topic, but...)

The actual plot is not her most compelling, shall we say, but the narrative voice is one of the best, and strangest, I can think of.