Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos

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Robbe-Grillet, she said to me once in bed, knew the power of surfaces as intimately as Ottoman architects.”

Late Style: Formal considerations of style when time has run out: Baudelaire or Verlaine or Huysmans on the style d'orat the end of empires, the crepuscular Debussy, late James, Wilde after the trials, Aschenbach at the beach, Don Fabrizio at the ball, time regained in Proust, final cigarettes in film noir, Djuna Barnes or Jean Rhys or Lawrence Durrell or Tennessee Williams or Thomas Pynchon or Martin Amis after the lover has left in a taxi, you see where this is going.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.” With all of the discretion of a gentleman thief, you step behind the desk. You realize that the risk you’re taking is nothing short of absurd. The attendant might return at any time. Decadence is a theory of the fall of empires, and Ancient Rome is chief among them. As Oscar Wilde wrote, however, "Nero and Narcissus are always with us," and the insight is and has been instructive for just about every capital in the modern world. How is Decadence a theory of modernity, about the ends of our own civilizations, about British or French imperialism, or about American or Asian cultural hegemony and decline? How do Decadent endings figure in the styles we call modernist, or postmodernist, or whatever has come after? Reed also feels British poetry “excludes” a language of “techno-apocalyptic realities” and he might be right. PANELS: 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 welcome expressions of interest for papers of 15-20 minutes long. Please send your abstracts to [email protected] by July 2nd, 2017.We’re never sure about Moth and Matt’s motivations, or even their cryptic relationship; it’s often unclear what exactly is happening, other than a situation that we should probably flee from. Later: Whether I think of myself as a Graveyard Poet leaning into Night, a Gothicized Decadent, or a zombie-Romantic, there’s a lot of influences at work in my poetry and I see all of those things as valuable to how I approach the Anthropocene.” Decadent Modernity: Decadence is a theory of the fall of empires, and Ancient Rome is chief among them. As Oscar Wilde wrote, however, "Nero and Narcissus are always with us," and the insight is and has been instructive for just about every capital in the modern world. How is Decadence a theory of modernity, about the ends of our own civilizations, about British or French imperialism, or about American or Asian cultural hegemony and decline? How do Decadent endings figure in the styles we call modernist, or postmodernist, or whatever has come after? For Bataille, the eye inspires both attraction and repulsion, eroticism and horror; it is at once a seductive anatomical feature and an ‘object of such anxiety that we will never bite into it’. Footnote 41 Holstein's engagement with this eye seems to be dealing with Bataille's work on a number of levels. There is an explicit confrontation of an innate fear of an eye's violation reminiscent of its slicing in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un chien andalou (1929). Here, though, the eye is both birthed and consumed, calling to mind the ways in which eyes and eggs are used as ‘substitute objects’ in Bataille's Story of the Eye (much as eyes and the moon are in Un chien andalou). Footnote 42 This is an amusing, but nonetheless captivating, vision of excess, recognizing that which is both at home and out of place, both gazed at and gazing. The birthed commodity finds itself cast into the mouth of the witch, who chews it up and in the process destroys it as ‘eye’. She turns decadent expression – as trashy, messy excess and overidentification – against the ‘gaze’ of patriarchal capitalism, as well as its gendered injunctions, and in doing so invites us to engage with decadence not just as a style or aesthetic mode; she invites us to consider decadence as a practice well suited to ruining that which ruins.

The perfect book for your nervous unmarried uncle who can’t stop collecting tweed waistcoats, or your aggressive lesbian sister who is really too into unpopular and historically-inaccurate pagan rituals. 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). The likes of broken down amusement parks and Soviet-era video arcades are especially pliable to Neo-Decadent ends. The skeletal remains of a mold-consumed roller coaster are a veritable chapel of the Mysteries. The enterprising necromancer might ply their trade in the evacuated playgrounds of Pripyat, while the theurgically-inclined can pursue apotheosis in the ruined bordellos of the Golden Triangle.”

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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. Considering "catastrophe" in the literary sense as the unraveling or denouement of a drama, what is distinctive about the endings of Decadent texts, Decadent events, Decadent careers, Decadent lives, or Decadent civilizations? What is or was modern or modernist about Decadent conclusions?