Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos

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The only type of connection I have to the tradition of reportage is coming up with the most efficient ways to deny, denounce or destroy its prejudice. Beyond humanistic pretence, reportage always conveys twisted or insidious values. Its economic survival has always been dependent on logical means to perpetuate the efficiency and the profitability of a system controlled by the elite for their own benefit. And one has to remember that no photography can pretend to show the truth. A picture only shows a given situation under a very specific perspective, consciously or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it’s up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.

The writer S.D. Stewart on Lane’s first collection (most of these observations are just as appropriate for Lane’s later fiction): Fig. 1 Lauren Barri Holstein appearing in ‘adolescent drag’ in Notorious, by Lauren Barri Holstein. Fierce Festival, Birmingham, 2017. Photograph by Manuel Vason. Image courtesy of Lauren Barri Holstein. If the obscenity of flowers poses a threat to tasteful or overtly masculine art, then that is precisely what makes flowers a valuable tool for New Decadent art.” Hints are dropped that this is not just a tale commemorating a doomed affair, but there’s a surprising concluding event and reveal. Proposals for talks (15 mins.), panels (3 talks), by March 1, 2020. Please send an abstract of about 250 words (and any queries) to Ellis Hanson at [email protected] we view Neo-Decadence then, as a technocultural bacteriology, an inherited sensibility individualised into its expansion, or as a subjective phenomenon launched in opposition to the ethical and moral restrictions imposed by society’s scientific methodologies and modelling practices? The image of a field of flowers in a poem alone isn’t Decadent simply because it is an image containing many flowers. There has to be too many of them. An obscene number. One must consider them a nuisance. A threat to Taste. Threateningly kitschy. Too much. Antoine D’Agata is a contentious character in the worlds of photography and art. Signed up by the Magnum photo agency in the period when they started to realise there was little money in photojournalism, his work’s brutal and self-destructive content has a habit of upsetting people.

The 3rd Annual Conference of the British Association of Decadence Studies and the journal Volupté and the Aestheticism and Decadence Network Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002) provides a glimpse to the gay subculture of 1980s’ London and New York, and contextualizes the issues like AIDS epidemic and gay liberation movement. The shown attributes of the gay subculture including the queer fashion trends, drug consumptions, and unprotected gay sex even at the risk of HIV transmission parallel the hedonistic and counter-normative ‘decadent’ aspects of Oscar Wilde’s source–text, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Cathode Narcissus, the video installation capturing the naked male beauty, makes Dorian the ‘dis-embodied’ model/emblem for gay pride in a digital era and marks the posthumanist shift in the new form of decadence or neo-decadence. This paper, with respect to Self’s Dorian: An Imitation, would engage to explore how the attributes of 1980s’ urban gay subculture and rapid transmission of HIV among gays come under the paradigm of neo-decadence in the fin de siècle (meaning, “end of the century”) of the twentieth century. He developed a taste for the cheapest wine—those vinegary distillations the liter bottles of which are unmarked by date—the types of grape poor pensioners drink so as to send their memories paddling off on thrifty lagoons populated by drowsy toads and featherless water birds. After drinking a few bottles of that liquid which was the tint of mule blood, eating a piece of liver fried in peanut oil, he would stroll off onto the piazza, sniff around the dresses of German tourists, swagger through the cafés, snatching up handfuls of potato chips from the counters, visiting remodeled urinals and subsequently striking up conversations with deaf widowers or young women who had grown fat on alpine cheese and who would deal with his advances by making guttural sounds and displaying mouthfuls of staggered teeth.”Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves, "don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him . . . .” --- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray BRENDAN CONNELL was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. His books include: Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2010), Unpleasant Tales (Eibonvale Press, 2010), The Architect (PS Publishing, 2012), Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chomu Press, 2012), Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Eibonvale Press, 2013), The Galaxy Club (Chomu Press, 2014), Cannibals of West Papua (Zagava, 2015), Clark (Snuggly Books, 2015), Against the Grain Again (Tartarus Press, 2021), and Heqet (Egaeus Press, 2022). In his most effective stories, Lane consistently steers clear of horror cliches, and builds disturbing and ambiguous situations (and, sometimes, creatures). His empathy for his characters is always clear; his prose is sharp, poetic, and full of memorable and quotable passages. Kublai Khan was a modern. Things fell apart a long time ago. We are already living in the ruins of civilisation. There’s nothing to celebrate. When you toast, make sure you smash your glasses together. This kind of writing should be the same. Harmony is overrated.” Today, I’d like to focus on Jeremy Reed‘s manifesto: “English Poetry: Neo-Decadence is the New Real.” In his manifesto, Reed claims Neo-Decadent fiction is about integrating “practices of synthetic biology into their subjects’ psychological and physical makeup” and he focuses on the excessive, poetic prose of SF authors like J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and William Burroughs:

In an unexpectedly nasal voice, he starts ranting about Post-Leviathanism and Cyber-Gaia Autonomy and Memetic Scorpiology and Indigo Child Discordia and Voudon Gnosticism and the Trans-Belial Singularity. His sermon makes little sense to you: perhaps, you wonder, because you are not a practicing occultist. Lascivious cyphers in hexadecimal Kabbalah will be scrawled in the margins of the apocrypha; we’ll craft expansion modules for electronic toys that elucidate our maxims in the language of the birds; our initials will be carved in luminiferous aether and every manner of arcana will be attributed to the letters, then we’ll permute them, weigh them, transpose them, and combine them to form an alphabet of artifice and triviality. We’ll pepper our canticles with preposterous lies and blatant contradictions. Only when the Akashic Record has been thoroughly falsified may our axioms be read between the lines.” In other words, a non-future. In the realm of Decadence—or Neo-Decadence—one can, of course, speculate and write intoxicating techno-apocalyptic languages inspired by, say…a future junked Tesla, for instance! DAMIAN MURPHY is the author of Daughters of Apostasy, The Star of Gnosia, The Exalted and the Abased, and The Acephalic Imperial, among other collections and novellas. His work has been published by Snuggly Books, Mount Abraxas, Egaeus Press, and Raphus Press. He was born and lives in Seattle, Washington.And here I am again, in the same hotel. Alone. I need to remember what happened, get it clear in my head by setting it down. If I can set it down. Memory is an infection: you can pass it on, but you can’t get rid of it. Still, I need to pass the time somehow. I buy a drink at the bar, a vodka and cranberry juice. That’s what Nathan used to drink. It seems important to remember him somehow. There are five men and two women scattered around the bar, all drinking alone. I don’t feel like breaking the mould, but there are no free tables left. So I take my glass upstairs. The collection opens with “Sight Unseen”, which appeared earlier in Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound anthology. It’s an affecting tale about the narrator dealing with his father’s death, composted with hints of cosmic horror. I’m fine. The Viennese apartment is a sure thing now, and we’re moving in about a month. I’m a little bit all over the place with planning and all that, but that’s not a bad thing. When I have some time, I’m reading “White Jazz” by James Ellroy, and my BJD boy, Julian, is finally in his full glory too (I sent you two photos on Facebook as promised). So, I’d say, all good.