Timothy Baker
@timothycbaker
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Lectures on Scottish and contemporary literature, writes about animals, tries to be hopeful. He/they.
Aberdeen
Joined April 2009
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Because my veneer of secrecy is starting to slip: Look, friends, I wrote a memoir! It's about grief and storytelling and bunnies, and about my mother. Out in September, available for pre-order from all the usual places. I really, really hope you like it.
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My aunt runs a martial arts training centre near Girona. She also has a new kitten. Here is one of her students training with the kitten. It is my new favourite photo.
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@elena_trueba
I once received an essay from a student with the file title thisisshit.docx.
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My students. They brought me a plant. In a pot decorated with their favourite quotes from the course. Might need to cry forever.
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Some of you are going to be facing your first holidays alone soon, and this is something I know how to do! Some hopefully useful tips:
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Post-it found on the final page of a library copy of The Well of Loneliness:
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So you'll see that my decision to offer students a choice between Eimear McBride and Anna Burns is the lead story in today's Times, under the heading 'censorship on campus'. Choice is not censorship, and I'm proud of this course, honestly.
For next year's students, and generally interested people (take that, FOI requests!), I've finalised my reading list for Vulnerable Bodies, Precarious Lives in the autumn. Blackwell's link here:
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I am delighted to report that apparently the best that Scotland has to offer are the stairs across from Tony Macaroni’s in Aberdeen.
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My father has a new puppy, and since seeing her picture made me feel better, I thought it might make you feel better too.
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Considering moving to confessional footnotes, e.g. 'This is probably important but I don't understand it' or 'This passage made me cry'.
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1. Make a plan. Don't try to replicate what you'd do with family, but have an itinerary. You'll be amazed how much space is left in the day. Watch that four-hour film you've been putting off. Read that book. Think of the thing you never have time for.
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My new monograph from
@BloomsburyLit
has arrived! Pictured here by the River Don, where almost all of it was worked out. I'd love it if you bought it for your library or reviewed it.
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9. I've come to really like holidays on my own, my own bizarre and accidental traditions and structures. But I think structuring your day in advance really does help - it'll give you something to look forward to, and make you feel like you have agency. It'll be okay.
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2. Cooking is good. Cooking your traditional family meal is bad - you'll get the timings off, you'll make too much, and it won't be as good as you want. Make something exciting and even complicated, but that you don't associate with the holiday.
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Working in UK Higher Education right now is just relentlessly heartbreaking. So many kind, committed, brilliant people trying their best to salvage things against constant destruction.
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@Jess_H_Anderson
My favourite from my family is when I say I liked visiting a city they'll be like 'well, why don't you just write to the university principal and ask them to give you a job there?'
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Since everyone loves the Moomin cafe in Tokyo that provides a friend when you’re alone, worth noting that I keep a big Moomin in my office for distressed students/colleagues/me, and this should be the new trend.
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Thursday night. Campus has been closed for hours due to storms. The two English lecturers with least home life meet in the corridor of an otherwise deserted building and proceed to argue for half an hour about whether or not Sally Rooney can be 'proved' to be a bad writer.
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3. If your family custom is sweets/alcohol first thing in the morning, don't do that. You'll just end up maudlin. Runs/walks are great on holiday mornings, and you'll be astonished how many other people are outside.
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I get absurdly nervous before lectures; it's fine, and I know how to deal with it, and I mention it mainly because I don't think we tend to admit these things enough. But today I've had three lectures to give, and my body does not know what to do with its constant state of panic.
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7. New Year's on your own is utterly, utterly dull. I go to bed at 11:30 every year out of spite, and I've come to really enjoy it.
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8. This year especially, your body might collapse. You've been holding so much stress for so long, and you'll find yourself in a weird vacuum of time, and everything will just catch up with you. It's okay. Take care of yourself. You'll make it through.
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It was the 19th anniversary of my mother's death on Friday, and not a hard year at all. But then, unexpectedly in my inbox today, a picture of her at 20, the year she got sick. I've never seen her so young before, or healthy, and I am bereft.
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The rise of casualisation is a moral stain on the academic sector, and I'm sending giant solidarity to everyone out on the pickets. There've been lots of great threads from ECRs, but I also want to say that the damage doesn't end when people get jobs.
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5. It's okay to be sad or sorry for yourself, and it's okay to think of it as just another day and do some work. Do whatever you're comfortable with. But also think of it as a time to make new traditions that are based around what you really like.
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For next year's students, and generally interested people (take that, FOI requests!), I've finalised my reading list for Vulnerable Bodies, Precarious Lives in the autumn. Blackwell's link here:
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6. It's absolutely cool to buy presents for yourself, if opening presents is part of your tradition. If you buy something now, you might still be surprised when you open it up! Likewise, buy yourself the nice food/wine/whatever if that's something that makes you happy.
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There’s so much I want to say about John Burnside; writing about and teaching his fiction (particularly Glister) changed so much of the way I think. But right now I’m too sad, so what must be one of his shortest poems.
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4. Pace your socialising. Your impulse might be to spend the day on Zoom. Holidays are often long (especially that Christmas to New Year's stretch in the UK). Spread out conversations with family and friends over those days. Boxing Day is the boringest on your own.
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Things are pretty grim for Modern Languages in Aberdeen. We have a petition (that anyone can sign) with a lot of links and additional information; we'd really appreciate your support.
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Out now, everywhere (or nearly)! My little book about grief, storytelling, and animals is ready to wing (hop?) its way to you! I really, really hope you like it.
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My only interest in life today is this picture of Muriel Spark being crowned 'Queen of Poetry' in 1932. (via )
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My new book, Writing Animals, is out now from
@PalgraveLit
. Here it is climbing trees and visiting the natural history museum. I’d love it if you considered ordering it for your library (or reviewing it!).
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I don't want to just rant into the void, but that's, what, 7? 8? English programmes in the last six months, and I know we are all individually terrified, but I don't understand why we're not collectively a bit angrier?
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At 15, I promised myself I'd write my mother's story, but not before I was 40. And now I've done it. I don't know if this strange little memoir about love and books will find readers, or is any good, but I kept a 25-year promise to myself, and today it feels like everything.
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I know everyone loves pictures of spring sunshine and flowers, so, um, Aberdeen today:
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I'm not sure I've ever had this in a peer review. Might need to sob forever.
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I just watched Dirty Dancing for the first time (I know, right?), as it was the closest I could come to a Channukah-appropriate film. And it's just phenomenal. Like, I was not prepared for how good it was.
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It is, I'm afraid, the month where I flog my new book a lot. So for starters, the finalised cover has now appeared online, and it's super-pretty. (Book is out 28.1. Preorder now!)
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I am beyond delighted and proud to announce that my student Sarinah O'Donoghue passed her PhD viva, entitled 'Narrating Autism: New Critical and Theoretical Directions for Reading Narratives of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Movement', with flying colours this morning. It's great.
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After a wretched week, this morning I attended a genuinely /excellent/ Teams meeting about Blended Learning, figured out how to write my next monograph, and (drumroll) won the University's Excellent in Teaching Award for Mental Health Champion. It's turned into a good day.
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There’s an actual stack of my books in
@BlackwellsAbdn
. Apparently, as a long-time bookseller, this is the only thing I’ve ever wanted.
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Happy University of Aberdeen Court decides on the future of modern languages day! I’m feeling quite emotional (all my dreams were of colleagues’ children being sad), but am so proud of how so many people, staff and students, near and far, have come together in this fight.
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Year's Work in English Studies is out, and yeah, I know it's completely garish to retweet praise, but I am very garish, and this is about the nicest thing anyone's said about me.
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I am so weary of the British hatred of universities. And sure, part of that’s because it’s currently targeted at the humanities, which I think are nifty, but I’m confident maths or biology grants would get the same vitriol. Research and teaching still matter.
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I tend not to feel settled in Aberdeen, despite having lived here for 12 years, but today I went to the bakery, cinema, and bookshop, and was recognised by the staff in all three, and ran into friends on the street and had an impromptu coffee, and it was all just very nice.
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What I read in May. (Not pictured: 110 undergraduate essays and dissertations.)
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I hate self-promo, but I’m worried you’ll all leave Twitter before buying my book, so hey, I wrote a memoir, and it’d be a really great present for someone you love and even if you don’t like the words it has a pretty cover.
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Oh hey, I have a book out today (electronically - print is next month, and I'll pester you more then). But if you like books about loneliness and attention and care in contemporary writing, I can do that!
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I've used this Mantel essay (on Orpheus and Eurydice, Princess Di, and her own life) to teach my students about ghosts almost every year of my career.
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I really want UCEA to understand how much better my research would be going if I weren't sad/angry/disappointed. Treating your staff with respect isn't just kind, but financial good sense.
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Gave myself a weekend of quiet, and accidentally figured out the next big academic project, after three years of confusion. It’ll be the most ambitious thing I’ve written, and take years, I think, but I haven’t been so excited about an idea in a very long time.
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It is a gloriously Aberdeen thing that because the temperature has skyrocketed to, um, 11, every single customer in the coffee shop was ordering an iced beverage.
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In a way I don't want to dignify the story with a response at all. But there is a part of me that is delighted that the Times is running a story on the value of contemporary literature...
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No one really wants a monograph under the tree, but my most recent one is now out in paperback (officially on the 28th), so… (Tree courtesy of our administrative office, as I am not so organised.)
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A room in a Premier Inn. Where I can't get the temperature remotely right. And there aren't enough pillows. And my dinner is a sandwich I bought at the Co-op across the street. In the rain. It's all I want, you know?
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Endemic precarity messes with your head. For many people, the sense that it all might disappear never leaves. Twelve years into my current job, I don't feel stable enough to get a dog.
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I do not predict smooth sailing in the future, and there's been so much damage done, but oh my word, this is good news.
STRIKE ACTION WITHDRAWN: SMT have agreed to lift the risk of redundancy from MLTI staff. A win!
#saveUoAlanguages
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I want to devote an entire article to talking about this fire safety training slide.
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I think I've almost finalised my contemporary women's fiction course for next year, and honestly, it looks amazing.
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Contract not yet signed, but formal offer has been made: my next book, 'Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction', should be coming out in just around a year!
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This is not a sob story - I'm very lucky to have a job - but I have had a total of ten days since March without a committee meeting, trying to put this term together, and many of my colleagues have worked far harder. No summer has been more gruelling.
Rather disappointing to hear the PM imply that universities were closed during lock down. My colleagues and I worked hard to deliver high quality online teaching and significant research throughout the lockdown; we will continue to do so - including by working from home.
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And if you care about such things, this is specifically kung fu, PGB Bangau Puti.
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Today’s incredibly cool post: the first Japanese translation of The Living Mountain (translated by Yasuhito and Miwa Sato), which I helped with in a very tiny way.
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Good luck to everyone returning to teaching today! May your classrooms be correctly booked and your attendance sheets vaguely accurate. May your ability to remember names increase tenfold. And may you find the confidence to remember that you totally know how to do this.
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Not that anyone in government will see this, but online lectures have improved my students' education. Because they're more accessible, and can be replayed, students are coming to class with a significantly better understanding of the material than in past years.
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Aberdeen students! If there are any anti-racism/BLM/critical race theory books you'd like electronic access to through the library that we don't currently have, send me a DM/e-mail. We're making this happen.
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Whenever this monograph comes out, if you read it, please know that every time I typed the phrase 'material world' I did sing 'and I am a material girl'.
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Why didn't the world like France? It was in Breton! It had fire pits! What else do you people want?!
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Is there a greater academic achievement than when a colleague brings in their new dog for the first time and the dog likes you best out of all the people they've met that day?
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My oldest online friend (livejournal originally, twenty years ago) just died. I'm devastated. Nothing to say, other than that even if we've never met, I love you all.
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Sometimes you are weary and sad and feel like death, and you think 'ah, only a very fancy cinnamon bun can save me' and then as you eat it the middle falls out, straight into the trash bag under your desk, and never was a story of more woe than this.
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Not saying Aberdeen Lockdown is already getting to people, but there were two old guys on the beach at 8:30, taps aff, just casually frying some bacon on the side of the walkway.
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So folks who don't spend induction weeks on university campuses in Scotland probably don't realise how constant the bagpipes are, and often limited the repertoire - so massive respect to the piper who just nailed the theme from Last of the Mohicans. Deep cut.
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A day worth marking: when you cite in your own work a piece by one of your former undergraduates.
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I know how much students are struggling this term, but they've been extraordinary. So thoughtful, so well-prepared and engaged... I am flabbergasted every day by what a privilege it is to speak for a few hours with smart people about beautiful books.
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It's December, so time for my annual what books to buy and who to buy them for round-up! (2021 publications based on where the copy I read was produced; I'll update this all month, and it's not really in any sort of ranked order, just books I liked.)
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I don't want to eulogise
@BelmontFh
, because, well, I am trying very hard to be optimistic about... something, somehow, coming out of this. But I want to say that I am devastated for the employees and the city; it is an almost incalculable loss.
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I feel slightly queasy posting about student award nominations, because of inbuilt unconscious bias and suchlike, but honestly, I'm pretty darn proud of this one in particular.
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This is absolutely extraordinary news. I've never really, when signing a petition, thought it'd work, but glad I signed this one!
🚨🚨🚨
JUST ANNOUNCED: The Scottish Government has completely abandoned its plans to cut funding for Creative Scotland, after more than 15,000 people signed our urgent petition to
#StopTheCuts
.
🎉🎉🎉
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Today's good news is two of my PhD students are done and dusted. Congratulations to Dr Hyginus Eze, who worked on social space in 3rd-generation Nigerian fiction, and Dr Pimpawan Chaipanit, who analysed domestic space in British women's fiction, Austen to present. I'm very proud.
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I absolutely do not blame a single one of my students who prioritises their work over study, but it is so clear just how much less time they have to read than they did a few years ago. (And also how many have to skip class because their employers are jerks who change shifts.)
How do you learn at university if you need to practically work full time to survive?
We now have a brutal two tier system, where the poorest students are utterly left behind & desperate, and no one is talking about it.
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Derek Jarman and HB, 14/02/94. I hope those of you who want love find it, those of you who have love hold it, and all of you find peace.
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Just revising a James Baldwin lecture, and this quotation seems to me to be one of the truest things anyone has said.
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2. ECR REF exemption. We all know that the requirements for permanent posts are too high, impossibly high, and rule out all sorts of people. So get rid of them. Just do it. Make a permanent post something you can get without a book or a big grant.
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Man, Phoebe Bridgers tickets for Glasgow didn't even go on sale. Watched the little countdown, and it immediately went to waiting list. Bah.
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And, in a lovely moment of synchronicity or cruelty, proofs of the monograph that parallels the course arrived literally six minutes after the last seminar.
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In 2022 I failed at every goal I set. Sometimes by a whisker, sometimes by a sea. And you know what? It didn’t matter a jot. Most folks didn’t notice. So 2023 is all about less self-pity and more forgiveness.
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