Timothy C. Baker

Excellent student journalism covering the first day of strike action at the University of Aberdeen. www.gaudie.co.uk/wpress/index...

‘A Different World’: Dorothy K. Haynes's Domestic Horror | Gothic Studies Throughout Dorothy K. Haynes's work Scotland is presented as uniquely infused with the supernatural and tied to the ballad tradition. Although Haynes published widely in the middle decades of the twen...

“At her best, Haynes might be thought of as Scotland’s answer to Shirley Jackson”

“‘A Different World’: Dorothy K. Haynes’s Domestic Horror” – Prof @timothycbaker.bsky.social in GOTHIC STUDIES 24/1, 2022
#gothic #horror
www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3...

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

This is what a religious education in the 80s gets you.
Also, I am having a really great time of it, mental-healthwise.

And out of nowhere, you're prompted to generate a list of Muppets as disciples.
Kermit: Peter
Fozzie: Andrew
Scooter: James
Rowlf: John
Gonzo: Philip
Beaker: Bartholomew/Nathanael
Dr Teeth: Matthew
Sam Eagle: Thomas
Stadler: OtherJames
Waldorf: Thaddeus/OtherJudas
Miss Piggy: Judas
Animal: Simon

The music at the Jesse Jackson memorial is giving me the most affection I've had for my country in a very long time.

It just took me seven tries to pass an 'I am not a robot' test. I'm TIRED, people, not a ROBOT.

I go through Lessing phases every ten years or so; I never quite /like/ her books, but there’s always so much there to think about.

Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor is the most troubling novel I’ve read in some time; its depiction of living on the fringes of disaster felt uncanny.

Saw a dance performance so Irish (Mám, by Teaċ Damsa) that at one point they sat at the front of the stage eating Tayto.

Really ironic and beautiful and sad to spend the morning teaching the importance of collective action right before the news of significant reshaping of my workplace came out.

Goths for Breakfast: Charity Teach-a-thon A full day of back to back classes and workshops on Gothic themes to raise money for the charity Magic Breakfast

This Saturday is the Goths for Breakfast charity day. Goths unite! We're raising money for Magic Breakfast to feed hungry kids with a teaching marathon of fascinating talks and writing workshops. Pop in and out as you like - the talks are recorded!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1982926549...

Literary Encyclopedia — Welcome

The Scottish Literature volume of the online Literary Encyclopedia seeks entries (1500-2500 w) on works, authors, and topics not featured in the database. If interested, please contact: pre-1945 ScotLit: Arianna Introna, Arianna.introna@open.ac.uk; post-1945 ScotLit, Gina Lyle gina.lyle@york.ac.uk.

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