| Alabaster
didn't hit his stride until he traveled to London
and fell in with the Decadence Movement, which
focused on the isolated role of the artist,
hostility to bourgeois society and a taste for the
morbid and perverse. They held a belief in the
superiority of the artificial over the natural.
The Movement had all but
come and gone from Europe when Alabaster discovered
it and was on the wane in England. Oscar Wilde
is one of its most prominent members.
Upon finding it, the
young writer wrote his family that he had found his
muse and scribed the Lad of Shallot, a tale
of lad who's melancholy was marked by continual
weeping to the point of dehydration.
The publication brought
him notoriety, a limited market, and an unlimited
variety of critics. One wag went so far as to
dub him the "Libidinous Laureate of a Pack of
Satyrs."
During this time he met
a Decadent painter named Swyberg (oft times nic-named
as "Swineburg") who convinced him to go on a Grand
Tour of Europe to complete his studies.
He even ventured down to
Egypt where he spent some time with Young on his Tut
dig and accidentally gave rise to the
mummy myth. |
