on tap for tonight

Thursday is an off-day for me anyway, but the entire University is closed due to a new national holiday: Taba Liberation Day.

Taba is in the Sinai, exactly on the border between Egypt and Israel. It was a disputed territory under Israeli control, but was eventually awarded to Egypt by international arbitrators, which I believe happened in the early 1990’s.

I’ve been to Taba once. There’s not that much to it… Essentially just a really nice Hilton and maybe one other hotel. There’s a nice reef for snorkeling on the beach behind it. It was constructed during the Israeli period of Taba (some old travel guidebooks refer to it as “one of the best hotels in Israel”), and hence there are a lot of Hebrew signs all over the hotel. The border of Israel is literally just a baseball’s throw away, most of the guests are Israeli, and even the hotel meals have a heavily Jewish flavor. When I was snorkeling, some friendly Israeli kids came up and started speaking to me in Hebrew, of which I don’t know a word except for the Arabic cognates, of which there are many.

In 2004 the hotel was severely bombed. (I had been there in 2002, and the wing where I slept took the brunt of the blast.) There was a large bomb concealed beneath some fruit in the back of a truck, and I think there was also someone with a suicide vest next to the swimming pool. It was disturbing at the time to read that many of the dead were Egyptian desk clerks, because those people were very kind to me, letting me go into their office to check e-mail at one point. No doubt some of those who helped me so kindly were killed. This was just one of my many recent cases of being at specific sites not too long before attacks. I hope my luck remains good.

Incidentally, there’s also an unusual “triple cities” effect there, especially at night. Taba (now Egypt) is right next to Eilat (Israel) which in turn is next to Aqqaba (Jordan). You can see all of them simultaneously from the Hilton, by day and by night.

Anyway… it’s been a quiet holiday in Egypt because of Taba.

I’ve already done a lot of work, but still need to make revisions to one pending article and write two lecture abstracts.

In between, I’ll be enjoying more of the Lovecraft biography (I’m now up to about 1926/27, so the “great tales” are beginning following his return from New York to Providence.) I also plan to read Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” which Lovecraft apparently ranked as the #2 weird tale in English following Blackwood’s “The Willows,” to which I linked on this blog last night.

As for “The Willows,” though I wasn’t blown away by it last night, it was certainly a good read. More importantly, I’ve found it sticking in my imagination all day today. That may be a better criterion than our immediate impressions of a work, since in the latter case we may be too focused on the immediate emotional impact of a tale, and this might be overly influenced by our mood or physical state at the time. (Last night, for example, I was in a state of utter physical exhaustion, and it’s hard to concentrate fully in such a state.)

But already last night, on a first reading, I could see that the mood of “The Willows” was about as eerie as it gets. And the crowning horror, with the vague yet horrifying description of a creature near the fire, and the Swede’s poignant “oh no, it’s found us” is truly terrifying.

This is also a story that might have benefitted from being made into an entire “mythos” cycle. If Blackwood were famous for 40 or 50 “haunted Danube island” stories, this one would gain in weight from the others, just as many of Lovecraft’s stories reinforce one another through their systematic interlocking. (My favorite such moment is when the narrator in “At the Mountains of Madness” refers to the unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth, the narrator of “The Whisperer in Darkness.” The least that can be said is that the faculty of Miskatonic University have had an unusually broad range of bizarre experiences.)