Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology

Justin Isis & Daniel Corrick (editors)

Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology (2018)
I'm not particularly well informed when it comes to the history of literature and the movements which have come and gone, excepting in relation to science-fiction or where writing has occasionally intersected with painting. I tentatively associate the Decadents with Symbolist art of the late nineteenth century, implying ornate, even florid prose following the logic of the mythic more than the crudely realistic, which at least squares with Huysmans' Against Nature, and possibly David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, plus a load of others which I've never read. Happily, these potential gaps in my knowledge don't seem to matter too much because the Neo-Decadents aren't in the revival business, at least not in the sense of certain sniggering twats with cogs and watch-springs glued to their top hats; and these Neo-Decadents are additionally defined by what they're against, much of which has me punching the air because up until now, I thought it was mostly just me. Crucially, for the sake of this review, amongst that which they reject we have writing which aspires to be something in another medium, writer's workshops, writing advice with all of its attendant careerist bullshit about character development, story arcs - basically all of the rote tedium which gets in the way of the actual writing, and which is usually only necessary if you can't actually fucking write and therefore have no business attempting to do so. Not everyone has a book in them, and maybe we should leave it to those who have.

The collection kicks off with an informative introduction and a couple of manifestos setting out the stall, much of which brought me great joy for reasons already stated, and which promises great things to come in the pages which follow; and for what may be the first time in publishing history - if you'll excuse the apparent hyperbole - great things do indeed come in the pages which follow. Drowning in Beauty seems to be loosely themed around varying notions of beauty, but without feeling as though anyone has been at work with a shoe horn, and even where the beauty is weird and upsetting from certain angles, its pleasure aesthetic is nevertheless communicated without recourse to any of the usual clichés - ironic contrast, or the sort of button pushing I'm sure you'll learn all about at the writers' workshop. These twelve authors work with different levels of realism, telling quite different kinds of story but with the same love of rich, expressive language where a single sentence may undertake more than one crudely descriptive task. It's ornate but never purely for the sake of design and even where that which is described may remain mysterious, the voices are clear, with nothing one could call impenetrable.

That said, I personally didn't quite connect with Avalon Brantley's Great Seizers' Ghost - more down to setting than the way it was told - but that was the only one. Initial skimming gave me cause to raise an eyebrow and roll an eye at all the transgressive weirdy music references in James Champagne's XYschaton, but upon reading the story I found it did the exact opposite of what I'd anticipated, justified what would have seemed clichéd under other circumstances, and was ultimately unlike anything I've read before - somehow deeply appalling and yet unmistakably descriptive of a form of beauty. Other highlights include Justin Isis' The Quest for Nail Art, Colby Smith's Somni Draconis, Brendan Connell's Molten Rage and Ursula Pflug's Fires Halfway, and I'll stop there rather than simply typing out the contents page because it's all good - great even, frequently startling and strange without having to pull silly faces, all of which makes Drowning in Beauty an absolute joy to have read, and a breath of fresh air the size of continental Europe after Conan fucking Doyle's droning train timetables. If you like to read, meaning actual writing, meaning anything you might read for reasons other than that it reminds you of something else and will probably do what you expect it to do, then you need the Neo-Decadents in your life.

Welcome to the Arms Race

Justin Isis Welcome to the Arms Race (2015)
Justin Isis is an enigma, at least from where I'm perched in Texas with the rest of creation perceived only through my little social media portal. I first encountered him when he sent me a friend request on facebook, apparently having read something I'd written - which is noteworthy because that sort of thing doesn't happen too often. He seemed to be either an Englishmen or an American living in Tokyo, and his interests combined with a slightly airbrushed looking facebook photo led me to assume he was probably some kind of idoru. Westerners fixated on the more lurid expressions of Japanese culture have historically irritated the living shit out of me, and yet Justin Isis seemed cut from a very different cloth to your average weeaboo.

I'm familiar with the term weeaboo because I'm down with the kids on the streets.

Actually, I'm not. I wasn't even down with the kids on the streets back when I was a kid on the street, or at least adjacent to it. I'm somehow in my fifties without quite knowing why, and new for the sake of new gives me a headache. I feel as though I'm stood on a beach, with all the proper culture safely behind on dry land. Before me is the ocean of all the shite that probably doesn't matter - Imagine Dragons, autotune, Japanese animation, Minecraft, YouTube commentators, drippy nostalgia, MST3K, cosplay, Doctor fucking Who, what a twenty-four year old thinks about almost anything, Pokémon Go, Chvrches, adult fans of My Little Pony, iPhone, eBook, anything else named by means of a self-conscious lower case vowel preceding an upper case consonant, and all other hopelessly passive distractions which have helped create the developmental vacuum in which evil fucking shitehawks like Breitbart, Infowars, and more or less all of our current political pantheon have been able to flourish; or, it's simply that I don't understand this stuff because it is of greater complexity than I have patience to decode for what I intuitively suspect may be very little reward. Either way, I know what I like - as the saying goes - and I find myself with an uncomfortable insight into those generations preceding my own whining that the bass is too loud, and I can't hear the words, and why don't you just put VH1 on or something, watch the Beatles or one of the classics - bit of Spandau Ballet, that'll do…

Justin Isis fascinates me because, stood on a possibly similar beach he gazes out and is able to understand what he's looking at and is able to deal with it, to reweave it into something of worth which carries what I feel to be the same weight as culture with which I'm more familiar. He is able to translate ephemeral culture in a meaningful way, and most crucially of all, he writes novels which aren't trying to be fucking films! In fact there's a couple of these which are probably unfilmable.

The lesser lights leaned backward on their own transmission-sculptures, indifferent to the performance fluids and ritual songs drifting down from the deep intervals. An and Non took broadcast armour from the lesser lights, rotating the transmission-sculptures into their own speech orbitals and adjusting their size, shape and cardinality to suit the local reign.

Welcome to the Arms Race comprises short stories, or short fiction, or possibly simply short pieces of writing, depending on which term works best. Most of these tales have a flavour as traditional as any Graham Greene you might care to mention yet without really resembling anything I've read before, utilising bold splashes of modernism and not even the faintest suggestion of mere technique being its own ostentatious virtue. Isis identifies as a Neo-Decadent writer, which is a thing you can look up, in addition to being author of the Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence, in which it is written:

No precedence is given to the Decadent writers of the 19th century, their modes or milieu. Neo-Decadence is more likely to cross 1990s video game dialogue with the structure of a 16th century picaresque to discuss a drug deal in present day Mongolia. Fealty and earnestness can only hold back progress. We do not have saints, and we consume our idols.

...and while we're here:

Writing can be neither sincere nor authentic; these are the cliches of the ranks of the dead. Style is a mute scream in symbols - that's all.

In practical terms, Arms Race adds up to what all those William Gibson novels promised but never delivered, with the rich, texture of maybe Clark Ashton Smith and the firework display innovation of Michael Moorcock at his most outrageous - which is my scrabbling around trying to describe something I didn't expect would be able to exist in this century, more than it is necessarily indicative of perceptible influences or even sources. As literature it reminds me of vapourwave - another new fangled phenomenon I would not have encountered were it not for Justin Isis - the repurposed or even stolen blended into something new and bright and fizzy. Most of these stories concern themselves with fictions of one form or another, people who are written, without quite going the full Borges and directly addressing the reader, although the mood is similar - playful and pretty much fearless, not too worried about pushing any of your usual buttons, not even during the unrelenting narrative barrage of M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY, science-fiction in a universe where all of those Sun Ra albums were documentaries - the sort of thing which logically should have fallen flat on its arse as a bad joke, but which takes flight with such jerky grace as to beg the question of why no-one tried it before.

It will sound like hyperbole, but I don't really care: unless I missed something - which is admittedly not beyond the realms of possibility - this collection does what literature hasn't done in a long time, and what I'd forgotten it can do, and should do; and even with the cheeky steals, homages and general thievery, it does it in a way which feels absolutely new without any of the usual ooh ooh look at me, you won't have heard of this, but I have bollocks. I'm still not entirely convinced that Justin Isis isn't an idoru of some description, but maybe it doesn't matter.