The writer S.D. Stewart on Lane’s first collection (most of these observations are just as appropriate for Lane’s later fiction): By studying the Interwar period to the present day across geographical boundaries, especially Britain and Italy, the research will offer fresh insights into the nature of Neo-Victorian decadence and explore its rich transcultural and cosmopolitan dimensions.

I’m very excited to have contributed the “American Poetry” manifesto to the all-new anthology Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos (Snuggly Books, 2021)—edited by Justin Isis. You can read excerpts from all 12 manifestos in a recent post at Dennis Cooper’s blog.

In contrast to the drab mediocrity of Dollskill & “dad trainers” & YouTube makeup tutorials, modern Nature has a fresh aesthetic. Forget the dreary old woman of the past, the New Nature is all grand gestures & pathetic fallacy.

The notion of any age being beyond parody is itself ripe for parody. For fashion, parody functions as a disinfectant, and if employed properly, it produces novel beauty through defamiliarization. Neo-Decadence, when considered by passéists and the ill-informed, might sound like a contradiction: how can there be new decay, fresh declines? This becomes clearer when it is realized that our clothes embody the decadence not just of the storied past or insistent present, but of various parallel paths in time. At the crossroads, where the accelerated Empire meets the ruins of remote antiquity, we are setting up looms, studios, 3D printers, molecular assemblers; the peasant threading a bone needle works alongside the sartorial artist-scientist of the future who knits discardable masterpieces from the raw materials of space. As the future declines into the present, Neo-Decadence is born, and the Neo-Decadent Man stands askance, clad in thrift shop items from sideways in time: a wardrobe of resurrected trends and impossible hybrids; the clothes of canceled histories.” The Neo-Decadent Man will draw little inspiration from those ultimate passéists, plants and animals. How pitiful are the birds, who have never thought to invent plastic surgery. Parrots chatter like businessmen, secure in their naive vulgarity, while swans wander the grass like drunken louts, and egrets congregate colorlessly like Uniqlo customers. The same spirit that would rehabilitate the facial contours of a dove is the spirit we will prize in our Neo-Decadent aesthetic consultants.”

When Dorian Gray heaved a French sigh over not merely the fin de siècle, but also the end of the planet, could he truly imagine it or the way his own culture was already causing it? When Baudelaire describes his readers' laying waste to the world with an opiated yawn, how do we take up now his invitation to recognize ourselves in this monstre délicat? What does it mean for us now to enjoy, teach, and even create Decadent literature, Decadent visual arts, criticism about Decadence, in an age when global warming and climate catastrophes have become our most urgent political crisis? What are the Decadent art forms and theories that speak to the current century and its numerous catastrophes? How does Decadence signify differently now, along with other related terms of the fin de sièclesuch as Aestheticism, Symbolism, Impressionism, and Modernism, as we contemplate our own fin du globe? How has Decadence figured globally in the political crises and aesthetic migrations of the past two centuries? This conference will consider the phenomenon of Decadence from its emergence as a social theory and an aesthetic movement in the 19th century to its current resurgence and refiguration in the art and criticism of our present moment and environment. I do think of photography as a perfectly legitimate artistic language, but I believe it is underused or misused most of the time. The world is not made out of what we see but from what we do. Photographers who ignore this state of things—and today, as in the past, most of them do—reduce photography to its capacity for recording reality. They don’t take responsibility for their position while looking at the world and end up assuming voyeuristic, sociological or aesthetic stands. Contrary to writing or painting, you have to confront reality while photographing. The only decent way to do it is to make the best out of your own existence. From a moral point of view, you have to invent your own life, against fear and ignorance, and through the action. Intelligence and beauty don’t compensate for passivity. The only way to keep one’s dignity is to confront human condition and social context through direct action. It is a difficult balance one has to keep between the creation of situations to go through and the development of a narrative technique to share one’s perspective. In this process, life overcomes art at some point, and art perverts life. By deliberately living in this constant tension, I expect to go through existence without having to give up lucidity or experience. 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.”