One of the best things about teaching from home, and I know that I'll be in a slight minority on this one, is the ability to do a spot of therapeutic ironing between classes. Yesterday I taught Djuna Barnes's dark modernist classic Nightwood for a couple of hours, then ironed until I was ready to face two hours of a departmental meeting. It's not that I see my colleagues as a pile of creased laundry in desperate need of a hot iron to the face at all. It's the contemplative nature of repetitively doing the same thing until perfection is achieved.
I know there are ironing-denialists who point to the intrinsically disordered nature of the universe and the inevitability of decay that comes with entropy and say 'what's the point?' For me, the pointlessness is the point. I know that anything I iron will be hopelessly creased within minutes of use, but for just a moment entropy – and its human facet, mortality – is arrested. There's little difference between writing a symphony, discovering a galaxy and producing the perfect crease: they're all ways to fill in the blank space before we surrender to the big sleep. I can't write symphonies, and all the admin that I could be doing instead accelerates the heat death of the universe rather than postpones it. I'm pretty sure that ironing is what Dylan Thomas had in mind when he wrote about raging against the dying of the light.
Anyway, today's records are 'Noise Vision 80' and 'Critical Gate' by Chicago band Assembly Line People Programme.
They're really notable for the high quality packaging - a real cut above most bands' early releases - and for being the first or nearly the first releases on Graham Coxon's label, Transcopic. As you can probably imagine if you know anything about the Blur guitarist's tastes, it's wonky punk-pop with a touch of Pavement and a lot of guitar. In a word, fun.
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