2013, The Palingenesis Project, 30 pages
First, I might add that Alex did a very haunting job with the cover art and front piece for this volume, which were so retro-gothic that I found myself trying to date them until I realized it was his work. His extensive annotation of the main body of the next was also refreshingly encyclopedic.
The introduction is a fine example of the essayist’s craft itself. It is organized in four sections:
1. Life
2. Thought
3. Essay
4. Discussion
The biographical sketch is well done. Alex shines in Thought, where he discusses Lovecraft’s view of life, including his deduction that appeal to a mass market was necessarily an appeal to “the lowest common denominator”. “This meant recognising that that the bulk of people who comprise the mass market, are superficial, sentimental, narrow-minded, ignorant, vulgar, and preoccupied with trivial concerns.”
In this single sentence, where Kurtagic is presenting the logic of writing in obscurity for a select market, he essentially lays out the practical dilemma for every thinking person of our age, an age which Lovecraft saw dawn.
Alex goes on to provide a sketch of the genesis of Lovecraft’s essay, and then gets on with the man’s connection to us, the select alienated audience that has sprung up from the generations since his passing, which was not long after the completion of the essay on weird fiction for which this essay provides an introduction.
“If one ‘liberates’ the individual from his race, tradition, and religion, one is left with a mere abstract civic unit, which, for moral purposes, is equivalent and interchangeable…”
Kurtagic goes on to describe the texture of our alienation as a lead in to the purpose of supernatural horror, which is one of escape from meaninglessness domesticity:
“...it is, in sum, a negation of the liberal conceit that ontologically places man at the top and the centre… Viewed in this way, supernatural horror in literature can act as a means to overcome the mental limits imposed by liberal ideology…”
I typically ignore third party literary introductions. In this case I read Mister Kurtagic’s introduction at the beginning of my second reading, and found his essay to be the equal of Lovecraft’s; so good in fact, I don’t see Alex getting work penning introductions for commercial writers of note, most of whom would not feel comfortable between the same covers as the mind that brought us Lovecraft like this.
