ATP The Fans Strike Back Preview - Pink Mountaintops

It's a little over a month away until All Tomorrows Parties: The Fans Strike Back is on and I thought I'd do a few previews of bands that are playing there, just to get me in the spirit for it. There'll be no particular order to it, just depends which bands I feel like writing about at the time, and I don't know enough about all the bands to do a preview of everyone. I'll stick to what I know.
First up, Pink Mountaintops.
Pink Mountaintops are one of Stephen McBean's groups, along with Black Mountain. Their sound is less heavy than Black Mountain, as I guess the name suggests, more classic rock and roll, without ever being derivative.
Got into Pink Mountaintops after seeing Black Mountain at ATP in 2006 and being hooked. After exhausting the Black Mountain discography needing a further fix. Not sure which version of Stephen McBean I prefer now. If you asked me a few days ago I'd have said that I preferred the Black Mountain sound, but now, I've just heard the new Pink Mountaintops album and it's seriously blown me away. Here's the description off of their Myspace:

"Outside Love" is ten songs of love and hate that read like a Danielle Steele romance novel but that would probably make for bad television.

"Outside Love" is the third album by Pink Mountaintops, AKA Stephen McBean, who has slowly emerged as a distinctive voice and a very special contributor to the North American songbook. A veteran of the Vancouver/Victoria punk rock scene, McBean is best known for his contributions to acclaimed rock band Black Mountain, as principal songwriter, guitarist and co-vocalist.

The ten songs on "Outside Love" are about or influenced by weddings in Montreal, winter, Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, Christmas albums, that one Exile song and that one Echo and the Bunnymen song, the Bermuda Triangle, being depressed in the sunshine, people who haven't made out yet but will in the future, The Everly Brothers, clowns in the ceilings, and bedrooms where skinheads used to live.

Friends and family who contributed to or appear on "Outside Love", in no particular order, include Sophie Trudeau (A Silver Mt. Zion, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Ted Bois (Destroyer), Jesse Sykes (Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, sunnO)))), Phil Wandscher (Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, Whiskeytown), Josh Stevenson (Jackie O Motherfucker), Ashley Webber (The Organ, Bonnie Prince Billy), Amber Webber (Black Mountain, Lightning Dust), Matthew Camirand (Black Mountain, Blood Meridian), Joshua Wells (Black Mountain, Lightning Dust), Keith Parry (Superconductor, the Gay), and Tolan McNeil (Caroline Mark).

It is seriously quality, I really like the previous 2 albums but this is somewhere else, it has an atmosphere right through it - a longing, yearning, oppressive, romantic, hopeful yet hopelessly in love atmosphere which can be both hard to bear yet beautifully uplifting at the same time. I really love this album. And it's out the week before they play at ATP so I'm hoping they'll be playing lots of stuff off it, as well as the classics.
Here's a few samples of them classics.
First up, their cover of Joy Division's "Atmosphere" off The Pink Mountaintops album



I really love this. How many successful Joy Division covers are there? And a cover of "Atmosphere" is pretty hard to imagine working. But it works by not trying to recreate the (if you'll pardon the pun) atmosphere of the original. The first time I had it on I never realised that what was coming was going to be a cover of Joy Division. And when the realisation dawned I got a huge grin on my face (I was on the bus on the way to work at the time...), a truly great cover.
Next up a live performance of "Slaves" off the Axis of Evol album



This is slightly more into Black Mountain territory, but there's no harm in that is there?

More classic rock 'n' roll - "Sweet 69" off The Pink Mountaintops



And finally "Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy", again off The Pink Mountaintops, which someone has put as the soundtrack to a guy at the Rodeo being thrown off his horse in slow motion...

At cross purposes

Alain Badiou on the BBC's "Hard Talk" programme.
French Philosophy vs the "Jeremy Paxman" school of hard hitting journalism makes a surreal, and strangely pointless, mix...

Take The City

2 Handsome Furs live tracks from Minnesota Public Radio, with a short but interesting interview between songs, including the genesis of "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything" through hearing a New Order song on a rubbish sound system.
Songs: "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything" and "I'm Confused."

Here comes the summer...

The sun's not out at the moment, it's freezing, and it's blowing a gale outside, but inside my heart it's Summer. Why? Cos I'm listening to The Super Furry Animals, that's why!
I've done this mix, a kind of "best of" SFA, and it was hard going narrowing the tracks down to include. I put all the albums on my MP3 player and rocked them back to back and I was surprised at the consistency. Before listening to them I was of the opinion that they tailed off towards the last few, but on relistening they're all pretty amazing, all having two or three absolutely essential tracks. The newest album has quickly become one of my favourite albums of theirs (shown by the number of tracks I felt had to be in the mix off it, though maybe that's because they're still fresh - but then again, every SFA track sounds fresh). Which is extraordinary for a group of such long standing. I also wanted to represent the side projects, thus increasing the amount of tunes I had to choose from. Plus b-sides. And all down to 80 minutes or less. I wasn't helped by my decision to bookmark the entire mix with Neon Neon's "Stainless Style": a personal indulgence, a track for the way I feel right now... I also decided to have at least one track from each album, which wasn't much of a problem, given the quality throughout. My one regret being that I couldn't fit on any Gruff Rhys solo stuff, but something had to give.
Here's the tracklist (all by SFA except where stated, also included where they can be found)

Neon Neon - Stainless Style (from Stainless Style)
Fire In My Heart (from Guerilla)
Fuzzy Birds (from Fuzzy Logic)
Acid Casuals - "Y Ferch Ar Y Cei Yn Rio" (from Omni)
Gwreiddiau DWFN Mawrth Oer Ar Y Blaned Neifion (from MWNG)
Neon Neon - Dream Girls (from Stainless Style)
Inaugural Trams (from Dark Days/Light Years)
Lazer Beam (from Love Kraft)
Wrap It Up (from The International Language of Screaming single)
Out Of Control (from Phantom Power)
Calimero - (from Hermann Loves Pauline Single)
Bad Behaviour (from Fuzzy Logic)
The Man Don't Give a Fuck (from Outspaced)
Chewing Chewing Gum (from Guerilla)
Where Do You Wanna Go? (from Dark Days/Light Years)
Ice Hockey Hair (from Ice Hockey Hair EP)
Suckers (from Hey! Venus)
(Drawing) Rings Around The World (from Rings Around the World)
Neon Neon - Michael Douglas (from Stainless Style)
Pric (from Dark Days/Light Years)
The Undefeated (from Phantom Power)
Neon Neon - Stainless Style (from Stainless Style)

And here's the link - enjoy - http://rapidshare.com/files/213331051/sfamix.mp3

Cometh the Hours...

Looking forward to the new album by The Hours. With some trepidation though. My initial thoughts on Narcissus Road were that it took risks, so with the second album come two questions, will it still be risk-taking? and will the risks come off? Anyway, looking forward to it with interest.
In the meantime I'll post the video to "Ali In The Jungle", a song I absolutely love



Can't beat it. Shall we say "rousing"? I love the use of the word "fuck" for extra emphasis late on in this track. Love it all down to it's fight commentary close.

Why Read Proust?

Becoming quite obsessed with Proust. The other day I suggested to someone who was "between books" that they should read Proust. She had never heard of him and asked me what it was about. Taken aback by the question I told her it was "about turn of the century France and society and stuff". She then suggested she wasn't intelligent enough for it, at which I scoffed, because she is obviously very intelligent, but she didn't seem convinced enough to want to read him. So that's my task - to explain exactly why someone should read Proust. As well as to convince that one doesn't have to be super-intelligent to approach the novel. The novel has a certain reputation, but one that is, as far I am concerned, unnecessarily off-putting.
(Before I start, as a kind of status update, and for any bearing it might have on the content of this, I'm about halfway through Volume 4)
So, first off, what is In Search of Lost Time about? Everything. And it really is. It is ostensibly about memory and remembering but within that framework it becomes a collection of thoughts on just about everything. The main themes are, I guess, art and love, and, because of the nature of remembering it is in a way an aesthetic of life; each moment, each feeling almost, is viewed in the same one views a work of art. It is not so much that each episode is captured by virtue of references to art (which they generally are) but that each moment is viewed as an artwork itself, and this creates the links with other artworks. Rather than the other artworks being mere reference points, they become embroiled in the very framework of life, and life becomes embroiled in the framework of art.
There is also a lot on social appearances and how a person can only ever be known through these appearances. We start from a name from which we imagine what a person will be like, the narrator putting all the history of a name into his imaginings of what the current holder of the name will be, but when he finally meets the person he cannot match the person with the name. The same procedure occurs with reference to places as well, all the history comes to nothing when he finally goes there, it is the individual perception and the circumstances one visits the place in that form the place. Consequently there is no stable person/place but only the person/place of the moment, and it is these moments which Proust aims to capture.
The thing that remains elusive in Proust, despite all his attempts at capturing it, is love. For all the words on love in the novel he can never pin down what love is, instead he concentrates on jealousy or desire, with long sections spent detailing such emotions without ever pinning down the cause. Love. I am reminded of the Dexy's Midnight Runners song, "This is What She's Like", where for the first section, when asked to explain what she's like, he can only come up with negative answers, she's not this, she's not that, and when he finally gets to the positive he can only emit a number of beautiful moans and groans while the music drives forward. And that is what love is, unexplainable but irresistible. If one could pinpoint why one loved another, it would not be love. And so, for all the words of Proust he can never approach an explanation of love, he can only circle it by talking of jealousy and desire. The whole novel's thesis that, for some, love is always pain can be seen to be a metaphor for this, the narrator as writer finds it impossible to explain love, just as the narrator as lover is unable to love happily.
Yet this in itself makes the novel beautiful. The message being that for all love's impossibility it is impossible to escape. Impossible and undesirable. For all that the novel spends over 3000 pages (not having finished my rereading this of course still amounts to speculation) not being able to describe love, it is still central to the novel. For all that the narrator knows that love will, for him, always be pain, it can not be denounced, it is still what drives, it is still beautiful, still...
There is a passage in volume four which remarks upon this elusive nature of love and connects it with the novel's approach to history which we identified above:

Doubtless I had long been conditioned, by the powerful impression made on my imagination and my faculty for emotion by the example of Swann, to believe in the truth of what I feared rather than of what I should have wished. Hence the comfort brought me by Albertine's affirmations came near to being jeopardised for a moment because I remembered the story of Odette. ... Was there not a vast gulf between Albertine, a girl of good middle-class parentage, and Odette, a whore sold by her mother in her childhood? There could be no comparison of their respective credibility. ... I should therefore be guilty of an error of reasoning ... in reconstructing the real life of my beloved solely from what I had been told about Odette's. I had before me a new Albertine...

It might be a bit of a leap to read this passage in the way I am about to; the first time I read it I saw this in it, but the next time it had gone. It was an almost Proustian moment as I continued reading over it, trying to rescue my original impression from becoming lost in the more intellectual returns I was making. The point is that this "new Albertine" is an Albertine separate from all history, an Albertine who can not be reduced to everything that has gone before, who can not be built up from the past, but who just is. It is an Albertine who, on the one hand can only be known via her history, the narrator's history (both with and away from Albertine), and all history (represented here by Odette), but, on the other hand, there is the Albertine who is loved, separate from everything. It is the former Albertine who the narrator's jealousy constantly sees; it is the second Albertine that the narrator only ever sees fleetingly. After this section he goes on that he should never have seen Albertine again, gone away, and just kept the feeling he had at that moment, unspoilt. Here, again, we see the Proust of the aesthetic of feeling, wishing to keep the feeling for himself, collect it almost, so he can revisit it whenever he pleases without the other Albertine coming in and ruining his feeling. We can see why love, for Proust, is equated with pain - being with the loved one is the one sure way to ruin his love.
The paradox is that despite this ahistorical nature of love, it is history (our's, their's, History) that leads us to the loved object. Proust has many instance of this, where, for example the place the narrator is in will lead him to a certain girl, or type of girl, to love, or where speculating on the nature of Albertine and her friends leads him to fall in love with them one by one, before finally resting on Albertine, and even this final choice is driven by circumstance.
The problem lies in the narrator's inability to fully let himself go and leave history behind. Alain Badiou argues that love is an Event, it is something that changes the current situation - things are never the same again, the situation itself is changed into something else - but is separate from it (and this is just a brief summary from memory and without reference), is not included in the situation. And isn't this what we see in Proust, where love is separate from all the history of the persons involved but springs, necessarily, from it. The narrator's problem is in not recognising this, in not be faithful to the event and clinging to the previous situation, still working within the old co-ordinates.
So, to return to the question I started with, what does all this have to do with "Why read Proust?" Because, rather than endless banalities about the nature of love, the very circling round the question tells us more about it than nearly every other book, and it's absence in the novel allows for our own love to rise, to inform the reading, and our love to be informed by the novel. It does not create some nostalgic impulse to remember old loves, but allows old loves to come flooding back and inform our present self on the magic and majesty of love.
And what better reason to read could there be than that?
I also noted that this self-evidently intelligent person said that she didn't feel intelligent enough for it, so a few words on that. First off, how does one become intelligent if one never reads anything "difficult"? One can dumb things down as much as one likes, but one has start rising up at some point. Secondly, I think it is a great myth that Proust is somehow difficult. The writing flows beautifully (standard only-reading-translation disclaimer), so even the longest, most convoluted sentences read easily. Compared to Henry James he is a an absolute pleasure. And while there is a lot of allusions to art and artists, even when one hasn't heard of them, the context generally makes the references intelligible and it can only serve as good thing to be made aware of new things in such a wonderful way, for the inquisitive it can open up many new avenues to explore.
So, I highly recommend reading Proust to everyone, don't be put off by the elitist equation of great art with difficulty. Obviously reading a 3000 word novel brings difficulties of its own, but every word is a pleasure, rather than a chore.

We Don't Need Nobody Else

Had this song come into my head in the bath, not sure why, hadn't heard it in a long while


"They built portholes for Bono, so he could gaze
Out across the bay and sing about mountains
Maybe."

That is still such a great lyric, and still so true.
And the line "yeah, and you thought you knew me", such menace in that line, menace you don't often hear in pop music.
Great song

French Navy

New Camera Obscura video



Tis twee ... but I like it like that!
Appetite duly whetted for album.

The Friday The 13th Mix

Here's a mix I've done to coincide with it being Friday the 13th. Although it has less to do with the date and more to do with the films. From the tracklisting you might be wondering how that works. The idea is of Jason Vorhees as pure drive. His compulsion to kill, as well as (or mainly) his compulsion to live, makes him the perfect ethical character - paying no heed to reality, to real life, to the everyday, he sticks straight on, never wavering from his need to kill (which is why I have a slight problem with a couple of the Friday The 13th films - he compromises on his desire). So the mix is formed by the idea of this ethic. Not the killing, but the ethic of living, of carrying on despite the everyday, of going beyond the everyday, of no compromise, of changing the situation rather than accepting it, of not compromising on one's desire. And it also contains a few samples from the films for good measure.
When I was putting it together I wasn't sure how successful it was, but having listened to it through I think it works pretty well.

Tracklist
A Silver Mt. Zion - Hang On To Each other
La Roux - In For The Kill (Skream's Let's Get Ravey Mix)
Mono - Ashes In The Snow
Spiritualized - Good Times
Chapterhouse - Pearl
Dead Boys - Sonic Reducer
Minor Threat - Screaming At A Wall
Kanye West - Love Lockdown (Flying Lotus Remix)
Scarlett Johansson - I Don't Want To Grow Up
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Sleep
The Game - Hate It Or Love It
The Duke Spirit - Bottom of The Sea
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band - blinblindblind
Dexy's Midnight Runners - Plan B

Here's the link - Friday The 13th Mix

My New Favourite Band

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are really my new favourite band. That name for starters. Does it work? I think it does, wear your heart on your sleeve, isn't that want we want from our music? It's certainly what I want.
And the tunes -



I checked my MP3 player and the amount of times I've gone through the album drawfs everything else on there, everything I've had on there longer, everything I've deleted to make room for other things. That despite only having it on there for a few weeks. I must listen to it at least once a day. At least. It feels like the old days, as a kid, only able to afford maybe one album a month and playing that album constantly. When buying an album was an event. And now, with all the tunes available around the internet that feeling has all but gone. Then, very occasionally, something comes along that just hits you and you can't get enough and you remember why you love music in the first place. No matter how I feel when the album comes on, by the end of it I'm smiling, dreaming of new love and remembering the joy, rather than the pain, of old.
"Stay Alive" has to be my favourite tune of all though. I quite often find myself unable to pass it when I play the album, repeating it over and over again. Sounds so fresh, so light, so romantic, in love, full of dreams, full of hope. This music packs my romantic mind.

On The Beach

Video for Sebastien Tellier's Roche. Huge floating lips, people painted blue, ...little Sebastien sat on big woman's shoulder...What more could you want from a video? And such a quality track as well...

Feeling like a leopard

Just been listening to The Harlem Shakes "Strictly Game" and it struck me that the line "I'm sick of dressing like a human when I'm feeling like a leopard" could be a concise description of Sunset Rubdown...

On reaching Halfway in In Search of Lost Time

Halfway. I know I shouldn't treat reading Proust as a task to be completed, but when reading something of such length it is heartening to know that you are out of the beginning, over the hump and everything's downhill now, the end in sight. And if I treat it as a task it is certainly an enjoyable task. I know the first time I read it I had several bumps on the road to completion. Putting the novel down, reading other novels and then steeling myself and returning to it. This time I am refraining from going away from In Search of Lost Time to reread Stendhal's The Red and the Black, which I was reminded of during my reading of Proust, and which I remember nothing of. I'm putting that off till the end of Proust though.
I am still enjoying the reading. No bumps this time, so far anyway. The beauty of the prose is keeping me going. Obviously I'm only reading the translation (I've gone the whole hog and am buying the newer version, rather than rereading my old copy) but the prose flows and the reading is surprisingly easy. I find myself comparing it to Henry James. With James I always find that the sentences are so complex that each one must be read and reread to fully get the meaning and it can become a tortuously slow process. A rewarding process, and James is certainly an amazing writer, one of the best, it's just such hard work. With Proust, despite the huge sentences and complex ideas (and again I should point out that this is the translation I'm refering to, how it reads in the original French I have no idea), their is always a flow. The words and ideas follow easily from one to another and so one feels embraced by the novel. It feels right. There is an occasional danger that such an embrace means that one's mind can wander during the reading, but it is a wandering along the ways of the novel's paths, rather than a wandering occasioned by boredom, by the desire for distraction.
It is odd that I have no real recollections of the first time I read Proust but I do remember the act of buying the first volume. I don't even remember why I chose to read it. I can only remember that one day, after finishing college I went and bought the first volume and got the bus home and began reading straight away. And it was a cloudy day, I remember that. It is also odd that reading it this time around it is all the small details of the novel that I seem to remember having read before, things that I never realised had stayed with me till now (As an aside, I recently began reading Don Delilo's Underworld, a book I could swear I have never read before. After about two hundred pages I began to read things I could have sworn I had read before. But I am absolutely sure I hadn't, I'd read a couple of Delilo novels but never Underworld. The feeling was so unsettling that I couldn't finish it). Perhaps it is indicative of the novel's evocative power, perhaps indicative of my trivial nature, remembering the small things rather than the grand ideas...
Yet isn't the novel nothing but a succession of small things? As the involuntary memory of which Proust speaks begins with some trivial thing which unleashes the power of recollection so what is recalled is not some generalized past, but a detailed past, a past where nothing seems forgotten. The past is nothing but this succession of small things built up into a bigger picture, recalling what Lacan says of a collection of matchboxes in relation to das Ding in Seminar VII:

During that great period of penitence that our country went through under Pétain, in the time of "Work, Family, Homeland" and of belt-tightening, I once went to visit my friend Jacques Prévert in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And I saw there a collection of match boxes. Why the image has suddenly resurfaced in my memory, I cannot tell.
It was the kind of collection that it was easy to afford at that time; it was perhaps the only kind of collection possible. Only the match boxes appeared as follows: they were all the same and were laid out in an extremely agreeable way that involved each being so close to the one next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced. As a result, they were all threaded together so as to form a continuous ribbon that ran along the mantelpiece, climbed the wall, extended to the molding, and climbed down again next to a door. I don't say that it went on to infinity, but it was extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of view.
Yet I don't think that that was the be all and end all of what was surprising in the collectionism, nor the source of the satisfaction that the collector himself found there. I believe that the shock of novelty of the effect realized by this collection of empty match boxes--and this is the essential point--was to reveal something that we do not perhaps pay enough attention to, namely, that a box of matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of an Erscheinung, as it appeared in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing.
In other words, this arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn't simply something that has a certain utility, that it isn't even a type in the Platonic sense, an abstract match box, that the match box all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the match box than the Thing that subsists in a match box. (Seminar VII 113-14)

First off we can note the smallness, the triviality of the object in question. And isn't this what we find in Proust? The raising of the trivial social encounter (for Proust constantly reminds us of the triviality encountered at the social gatherings he attends)into such a great work of art. Here we find the second point: that of sublimation. The matchboxes are a great example of a Lacanian definition of Sublimation: "The raising of an object to the dignity of the thing". Something else that Lacan says of das Ding in Seminar VII can also be read in relation to Proust:

... das Ding is at the centre only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget - the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconcious only a representation can represent.

Das Ding is impossible to forget but always excluded, inaccessible, thus Proust remembers everything else in an attempt to reach das Ding. And here we enter sublimation, the raising of the object to the dignity of the thing: these rememberings become great art, and here Alenka Zupančič's gloss on the Lacanian sublimation is useful:

sublimation ... creates socially recognized values ... [this] formulation ... is to be taken absolutely literally: what is at stake is the creation of values, not simply the act of adhering to already existing values to which our "plastic" drives then have to adapt themselves ... On the contrary, what is at stake is that all great sublimations ... create new values, transform certain things into values.

The point being that in missing his object Proust creates something great, something wholly new. And isn't this figured throughout the novel as the narrator never sits down to work on his great piece of art, instead continuously socialises, and is constantly worrying about his inability to write, and yet the distraction becomes the centrepiece of the artwork: the trivial thing that prevented the artwork becomes the work itself.
Something that I find interesting, and yet something that could be dangerous to raise halfway through the novel, is the way the novel is structured to apparently reveal a depth which never occurs. The general pattern is that we start with a name (Guermantes, Balbec) and are lead to believe that we will get to the heart of the name, and yet what we find is that all the depth is in the name itself, the pictures which are conjured by the name. When we look deeper their is nothing but disappointment, we do not find what we are looking for. To borrow something else from Lacan, our enjoyment only comes on "looking awry". The first dinner party at the Guermantes is a great example of this, where the narrator says that all the talk at the table is dull compared to the conversation on the lineage of the names of the family, a conversation the socialites presume dull, but which, because of the images it evokes the narrator finds delightful.
This lack of depth applies to the people themselves as well. When the people, who were for so long merely names, become known, they do not reveal themselves with any notion of depth, but instead are found to be nothing but their surface. Which perhaps explains, or possibly is explained by, the emphasis on social etiquette, throughout the novel. It is only through such outward shows that one gets to know a person and no matter how far he delves, he returns constantly to the form of a person, rather than the content. And, as we can not know the essentials of other people, the only way forward for Proust is for a world view based on our own percerptions, so that everyone he meets becomes the sum of what Proust remembers or has read in mythology or novels or seen in art - there is no other way he can see to capture people but through his own perceptions.
What this leads to in Proust is a priviliging of the aesthetic over everything else, with no opportunity to get into the minds of other people we can only view them from the outside, as works of art; the form of the novel means that even feelings are viewed like this, even ones own feelings are viewed from a distance, an aesthetic distance. At the start of Volume 4 (I have continued reading so am now slightly over half way...) Swann says something that sums this up:

Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp. The memory of those feelings is something that's to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to look at it. You mustn't laugh at this idealistic jargon, but what I mean to say is that I've been very fond of life and very fond of art. Well, now that I'm a little too weary to live with other people, these old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me - it's the mania of all collectors- very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing.
Just as in the quote from Lacan above we see the reference to the collector, and again we see the looking back to incidents in the past. They are seen from the point of view of objects though, art objects, his heart opens to himself "like a sort of showcase", emotion no longer felt but viewed, studied, collected, examined

This aestheticism is made possible by the passing of time, by no longer feeling the emotions. In Volume 1 Swann is described as not wanting to get over his love for Odette because it would mean the death of himself:

But the truth was that in the depths of his morbid condition he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which would in fact amount to the death of all that he now was.

So our previous emotional states can be viewed from this aesthetic distance because essentially they no longer concern ourselves, but the entirely different person we were at the time.
The question is: is that an attitude that is posited as desirable per se? Rather than as an attitude for old age, when one is "weary", is there not a sense that Proust desires this attitude of aesthetic detachment throughout his life. Of course given the form of the novel as a collection of memories it is a question that is difficult to approach, all attitudes from the earlier viewed through the lens of the older, "wearier" self. It must also be considered whether the older self retrospectively desires this detachment - considers it an attitude he should have had earlier in life - and thus puts it into his younger self, or whether he has remained consistent to this attitude throughout. We can see throughout the novel that the narrator considers everything but art a distraction. His friendship with Saint-Loup is presented as getting in the way of his writing. He puts this down to his laziness, prefering anything but sitting down and writing, a constant deferral. We see the egotism that runs throughout here, where Saint-Loup is always presented as being completely committed to the friendship whereas the narrator remains seemingly distant. This is the opposite side of the central importance that Proust gives to his own perceptions, where he becomes the centre of the universe with everyone one else spinning around him. See for instance the scenes with Saint-Loup's friends, where they are all falling over themselves to know and befriend the narrator. Whereas on the one hand this could be seen as simply a desire to present himself as a great, hugely likeable person, on the other hand it seems to be a necessary counterpart to the central importance he places in one's own perceptions.
As I'm only halfway thorugh I obviously can't make huge sweeping statements on the novel just yet, so I'll leave these thoughts here for the moment. Just one more thing I wanted to mention at this point, which is that I read somewhere that the internet would have been the perfect medium for Proust; the collection of memories would have been better suited to hyperlinking allowing the route through the novel to be more open, reflecting the nature of memory. This led me to think of certain aspects of the internet and social networking which would have possibly made such a novel a lot more unlikely to be written now. The whole idea of memory has changed, whereas Proust primarily has his own perceptions with which to summon the past, thus colouring his reflections, now, with online photo albums, photo-tagging, blogs, a whole raft of information available immediately via a single search, the need for such memory has been lost. This is an area which deserves a lot more space than I'm giving it here, so I'll leave that as a half finished thought.