An American in Lima » Lima weather http://americaninlima.com slices of my life in Peru Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:55:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 How to (Maybe) Cure a Lima Chest Cold http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:03:18 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=476 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
Adult men do dress as mustard bottles...sometimes
Sr. Mostazo
El Fotografo can't kick this chest cold he's been suffering with for three weeks. Not even the schlep to Santa Eulalia last weekend could knock it out of his system.  So I decided to try a home remedy on him that I read about in Suite 101. Now EF's lying in bed swathed in poultices and blankets, just four feet away from me, and the room reeks of Indian food. Let me explain. Earlier this morning I read about this great mustard plaster (also known as a "poultice") you can make to get rid of lingering chest congestion. That home remedy sounded right for what's ailing EF: For three weeks he's been taking Robitussin and Paltomiel (a Peruvian homeopathic cough syrup), drinking hot tea with honey and popping vitamin Cs to no effect. Something stronger (stranger?) was in order. The mustard plaster recipe caught my eye because I remember as a kid seeing a movie in which some orphaned kids who live in the country subject their sick landlord (played by Harry Dean Stanton) to an intense cure involving a poultice of hot cooked onions. The film is based on the classic children's novel Where the Lilies Bloom, by Bill and Vera Cleaver, and that onion scene has always stayed with me. In that scene Stanton's character, whose name is Kaiser Pease, is on his deathbed wearing these tragic-looking long-johns, and the orphans give him a bath in the onions, long-johns and all.
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
The treatment works, Kaiser lives, and I think he marries the oldest girl (the one with the brown hair in the film still). EF isn't as sick as Kaiser Pease, but I figured a stinky poultice might have a transformative effect on him. Now comes the part of the story where it gets that Lima twist. The recipe for a mustard plaster calls for mustard powder. You mix it with flour and hot water, and the hot water activates the mustard's chemical compounds, creating a thick paste that heats up on its own. You can't use prepared mustard out of a squeeze bottle. (I searched that on Google too.) It has to be dried mustard powder or mustard seeds that you grind yourself. Supermarkets in the United States carry mustard powder, but this being Peru, I wasn't sure Wong would have it. As I found out this morning, they don't. "Ah," one employee told me, "Cordon Bleu makes polvo de mostaza." He smiled. "Sorry, we don't carry that brand." After searching ten more minutes among the spices, I found a jar of Badia curry powder, which contains powdered mustard.  That was the closest I'd come, I decided. "Why not aji?" the Wong employee asked. I bought a packet of that for good measure. So now EF's been lying here for half an hour with a towelful of curry/aji paste tucked under his t-shirt. The curry mixture didn't get extremely hot like the mustard paste is supposed to, but it did warm his chest. Prior to applying the poultice, I smeared him with olive oil so the spices wouldn't irritate his skin. The instructions said to do that. EF is hacking up mucus. "It's working," he says. "I wasn't coughing up anything before." We just peeled off the poultice. I wiped off the oil on his chest with a napkin. It came away bright yellow, the color of mustard and tumeric and aji. Yikes. He's been curried. Update on EF's grippe (Sat.): The curry plaster helped a bit, but not enough. The next day I hauled EF to the reliable cevicheria Punto Azul to get him some chupe pescado (fish soup) with aji and lime juice added. That helped open things up. Later that night, he steamed his head over a bowl of hot water and eucalyptus oil, which made him feel a lot better. He's been doing that regularly and was well enough today to have a meeting in San Isidro.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/feed/ 9 Moby Dick, Herman Melville & “Strange, Sad” Lima http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:49:58 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=454 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
"...like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two"
Rereading yesterday's post on writers and Lima's weather, I became curious about Herman Melville's riff on Lima as "the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see."  When did Melville visit Lima? What prompted him to go into spasms of melancholy? A quick Google search revealed that the quote doesn't belong to Melville, per se, but rather to Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick.  The novel revolves around an embittered seaman, Captain Ahab, who is consumed with hunting down and killing the white albino whale who caused him to lose his leg. In Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishamel begins:
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
That statement opens the door to a hallucinatory series of free-associations on  "whiteness" and albinoism, and how that quality can inspire terror, especially if it's a big white carnivorous whale you're talking about. In his metaphorical twistings and turnings, the narrator seizes on Lima as an example of a lifeless "white" city, one dominated by Pizarro's legacy of white colonialism, with its racial and class divisions:
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of her skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;- it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
The narrator is spot on when it comes to some of Lima's low points: "cathedral-toppling" earthquakes, rough seas, and lack of rain (the "tearlessness of her skies"), natural phenomena that exist today. The city's architecture is what really gets his goat, however (it seems that the narrator visits Lima right after an earthquake has wrecked everything). The narrator's description of Lima in ruins is drawn from Melville's own observations of the city in 1844, when he sailed to Peru as a crew member on the USS United States. Literary scholars have been fascinated by Melville's obsession with the city of Lima.  The anthology Melville "Among the Nations" (edited by Sanford Marovitz and A.C. Christodoulou) includes a chapter by Wyn Kelly on Moby Dick and "The Style of Lima." Kelly's chapter is worth a read, especially as it probes Melville's hatred of the European conquest of Peru and how he invokes that disgust through descriptions of Lima's Plaza de Armas.
Herman Melville
Author Herman Melville
Melville was deeply shaken by his visit to Lima in 1844, and in his imagination, the city's Spanish-style architecture and its ruins expressed the "barbarism at the heart of urban civilization," Kelly says. I'd bet 100 soles Melville visited Lima during winter.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/feed/ 7 Desperately Seeking Sunlight http://americaninlima.com slices of my life in Peru Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:55:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 An American in Lima » Lima weather http://americaninlima.com slices of my life in Peru Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:55:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 How to (Maybe) Cure a Lima Chest Cold http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:03:18 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=476 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
Adult men do dress as mustard bottles...sometimes
Sr. Mostazo
El Fotografo can't kick this chest cold he's been suffering with for three weeks. Not even the schlep to Santa Eulalia last weekend could knock it out of his system.  So I decided to try a home remedy on him that I read about in Suite 101. Now EF's lying in bed swathed in poultices and blankets, just four feet away from me, and the room reeks of Indian food. Let me explain. Earlier this morning I read about this great mustard plaster (also known as a "poultice") you can make to get rid of lingering chest congestion. That home remedy sounded right for what's ailing EF: For three weeks he's been taking Robitussin and Paltomiel (a Peruvian homeopathic cough syrup), drinking hot tea with honey and popping vitamin Cs to no effect. Something stronger (stranger?) was in order. The mustard plaster recipe caught my eye because I remember as a kid seeing a movie in which some orphaned kids who live in the country subject their sick landlord (played by Harry Dean Stanton) to an intense cure involving a poultice of hot cooked onions. The film is based on the classic children's novel Where the Lilies Bloom, by Bill and Vera Cleaver, and that onion scene has always stayed with me. In that scene Stanton's character, whose name is Kaiser Pease, is on his deathbed wearing these tragic-looking long-johns, and the orphans give him a bath in the onions, long-johns and all.
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
The treatment works, Kaiser lives, and I think he marries the oldest girl (the one with the brown hair in the film still). EF isn't as sick as Kaiser Pease, but I figured a stinky poultice might have a transformative effect on him. Now comes the part of the story where it gets that Lima twist. The recipe for a mustard plaster calls for mustard powder. You mix it with flour and hot water, and the hot water activates the mustard's chemical compounds, creating a thick paste that heats up on its own. You can't use prepared mustard out of a squeeze bottle. (I searched that on Google too.) It has to be dried mustard powder or mustard seeds that you grind yourself. Supermarkets in the United States carry mustard powder, but this being Peru, I wasn't sure Wong would have it. As I found out this morning, they don't. "Ah," one employee told me, "Cordon Bleu makes polvo de mostaza." He smiled. "Sorry, we don't carry that brand." After searching ten more minutes among the spices, I found a jar of Badia curry powder, which contains powdered mustard.  That was the closest I'd come, I decided. "Why not aji?" the Wong employee asked. I bought a packet of that for good measure. So now EF's been lying here for half an hour with a towelful of curry/aji paste tucked under his t-shirt. The curry mixture didn't get extremely hot like the mustard paste is supposed to, but it did warm his chest. Prior to applying the poultice, I smeared him with olive oil so the spices wouldn't irritate his skin. The instructions said to do that. EF is hacking up mucus. "It's working," he says. "I wasn't coughing up anything before." We just peeled off the poultice. I wiped off the oil on his chest with a napkin. It came away bright yellow, the color of mustard and tumeric and aji. Yikes. He's been curried. Update on EF's grippe (Sat.): The curry plaster helped a bit, but not enough. The next day I hauled EF to the reliable cevicheria Punto Azul to get him some chupe pescado (fish soup) with aji and lime juice added. That helped open things up. Later that night, he steamed his head over a bowl of hot water and eucalyptus oil, which made him feel a lot better. He's been doing that regularly and was well enough today to have a meeting in San Isidro.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/feed/ 9 Moby Dick, Herman Melville & “Strange, Sad” Lima http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:49:58 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=454 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
"...like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two"
Rereading yesterday's post on writers and Lima's weather, I became curious about Herman Melville's riff on Lima as "the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see."  When did Melville visit Lima? What prompted him to go into spasms of melancholy? A quick Google search revealed that the quote doesn't belong to Melville, per se, but rather to Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick.  The novel revolves around an embittered seaman, Captain Ahab, who is consumed with hunting down and killing the white albino whale who caused him to lose his leg. In Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishamel begins:
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
That statement opens the door to a hallucinatory series of free-associations on  "whiteness" and albinoism, and how that quality can inspire terror, especially if it's a big white carnivorous whale you're talking about. In his metaphorical twistings and turnings, the narrator seizes on Lima as an example of a lifeless "white" city, one dominated by Pizarro's legacy of white colonialism, with its racial and class divisions:
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of her skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;- it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
The narrator is spot on when it comes to some of Lima's low points: "cathedral-toppling" earthquakes, rough seas, and lack of rain (the "tearlessness of her skies"), natural phenomena that exist today. The city's architecture is what really gets his goat, however (it seems that the narrator visits Lima right after an earthquake has wrecked everything). The narrator's description of Lima in ruins is drawn from Melville's own observations of the city in 1844, when he sailed to Peru as a crew member on the USS United States. Literary scholars have been fascinated by Melville's obsession with the city of Lima.  The anthology Melville "Among the Nations" (edited by Sanford Marovitz and A.C. Christodoulou) includes a chapter by Wyn Kelly on Moby Dick and "The Style of Lima." Kelly's chapter is worth a read, especially as it probes Melville's hatred of the European conquest of Peru and how he invokes that disgust through descriptions of Lima's Plaza de Armas.
Herman Melville
Author Herman Melville
Melville was deeply shaken by his visit to Lima in 1844, and in his imagination, the city's Spanish-style architecture and its ruins expressed the "barbarism at the heart of urban civilization," Kelly says. I'd bet 100 soles Melville visited Lima during winter.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/feed/ 7 Desperately Seeking Sunlight http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:03:18 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=476 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
Adult men do dress as mustard bottles...sometimes
Sr. Mostazo
El Fotografo can't kick this chest cold he's been suffering with for three weeks. Not even the schlep to Santa Eulalia last weekend could knock it out of his system.  So I decided to try a home remedy on him that I read about in Suite 101. Now EF's lying in bed swathed in poultices and blankets, just four feet away from me, and the room reeks of Indian food. Let me explain. Earlier this morning I read about this great mustard plaster (also known as a "poultice") you can make to get rid of lingering chest congestion. That home remedy sounded right for what's ailing EF: For three weeks he's been taking Robitussin and Paltomiel (a Peruvian homeopathic cough syrup), drinking hot tea with honey and popping vitamin Cs to no effect. Something stronger (stranger?) was in order. The mustard plaster recipe caught my eye because I remember as a kid seeing a movie in which some orphaned kids who live in the country subject their sick landlord (played by Harry Dean Stanton) to an intense cure involving a poultice of hot cooked onions. The film is based on the classic children's novel Where the Lilies Bloom, by Bill and Vera Cleaver, and that onion scene has always stayed with me. In that scene Stanton's character, whose name is Kaiser Pease, is on his deathbed wearing these tragic-looking long-johns, and the orphans give him a bath in the onions, long-johns and all.
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
The treatment works, Kaiser lives, and I think he marries the oldest girl (the one with the brown hair in the film still). EF isn't as sick as Kaiser Pease, but I figured a stinky poultice might have a transformative effect on him. Now comes the part of the story where it gets that Lima twist. The recipe for a mustard plaster calls for mustard powder. You mix it with flour and hot water, and the hot water activates the mustard's chemical compounds, creating a thick paste that heats up on its own. You can't use prepared mustard out of a squeeze bottle. (I searched that on Google too.) It has to be dried mustard powder or mustard seeds that you grind yourself. Supermarkets in the United States carry mustard powder, but this being Peru, I wasn't sure Wong would have it. As I found out this morning, they don't. "Ah," one employee told me, "Cordon Bleu makes polvo de mostaza." He smiled. "Sorry, we don't carry that brand." After searching ten more minutes among the spices, I found a jar of Badia curry powder, which contains powdered mustard.  That was the closest I'd come, I decided. "Why not aji?" the Wong employee asked. I bought a packet of that for good measure. So now EF's been lying here for half an hour with a towelful of curry/aji paste tucked under his t-shirt. The curry mixture didn't get extremely hot like the mustard paste is supposed to, but it did warm his chest. Prior to applying the poultice, I smeared him with olive oil so the spices wouldn't irritate his skin. The instructions said to do that. EF is hacking up mucus. "It's working," he says. "I wasn't coughing up anything before." We just peeled off the poultice. I wiped off the oil on his chest with a napkin. It came away bright yellow, the color of mustard and tumeric and aji. Yikes. He's been curried. Update on EF's grippe (Sat.): The curry plaster helped a bit, but not enough. The next day I hauled EF to the reliable cevicheria Punto Azul to get him some chupe pescado (fish soup) with aji and lime juice added. That helped open things up. Later that night, he steamed his head over a bowl of hot water and eucalyptus oil, which made him feel a lot better. He's been doing that regularly and was well enough today to have a meeting in San Isidro.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/feed/ 9 An American in Lima » Lima weather http://americaninlima.com slices of my life in Peru Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:55:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 How to (Maybe) Cure a Lima Chest Cold http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:03:18 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=476 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
Adult men do dress as mustard bottles...sometimes
Sr. Mostazo
El Fotografo can't kick this chest cold he's been suffering with for three weeks. Not even the schlep to Santa Eulalia last weekend could knock it out of his system.  So I decided to try a home remedy on him that I read about in Suite 101. Now EF's lying in bed swathed in poultices and blankets, just four feet away from me, and the room reeks of Indian food. Let me explain. Earlier this morning I read about this great mustard plaster (also known as a "poultice") you can make to get rid of lingering chest congestion. That home remedy sounded right for what's ailing EF: For three weeks he's been taking Robitussin and Paltomiel (a Peruvian homeopathic cough syrup), drinking hot tea with honey and popping vitamin Cs to no effect. Something stronger (stranger?) was in order. The mustard plaster recipe caught my eye because I remember as a kid seeing a movie in which some orphaned kids who live in the country subject their sick landlord (played by Harry Dean Stanton) to an intense cure involving a poultice of hot cooked onions. The film is based on the classic children's novel Where the Lilies Bloom, by Bill and Vera Cleaver, and that onion scene has always stayed with me. In that scene Stanton's character, whose name is Kaiser Pease, is on his deathbed wearing these tragic-looking long-johns, and the orphans give him a bath in the onions, long-johns and all.
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
The treatment works, Kaiser lives, and I think he marries the oldest girl (the one with the brown hair in the film still). EF isn't as sick as Kaiser Pease, but I figured a stinky poultice might have a transformative effect on him. Now comes the part of the story where it gets that Lima twist. The recipe for a mustard plaster calls for mustard powder. You mix it with flour and hot water, and the hot water activates the mustard's chemical compounds, creating a thick paste that heats up on its own. You can't use prepared mustard out of a squeeze bottle. (I searched that on Google too.) It has to be dried mustard powder or mustard seeds that you grind yourself. Supermarkets in the United States carry mustard powder, but this being Peru, I wasn't sure Wong would have it. As I found out this morning, they don't. "Ah," one employee told me, "Cordon Bleu makes polvo de mostaza." He smiled. "Sorry, we don't carry that brand." After searching ten more minutes among the spices, I found a jar of Badia curry powder, which contains powdered mustard.  That was the closest I'd come, I decided. "Why not aji?" the Wong employee asked. I bought a packet of that for good measure. So now EF's been lying here for half an hour with a towelful of curry/aji paste tucked under his t-shirt. The curry mixture didn't get extremely hot like the mustard paste is supposed to, but it did warm his chest. Prior to applying the poultice, I smeared him with olive oil so the spices wouldn't irritate his skin. The instructions said to do that. EF is hacking up mucus. "It's working," he says. "I wasn't coughing up anything before." We just peeled off the poultice. I wiped off the oil on his chest with a napkin. It came away bright yellow, the color of mustard and tumeric and aji. Yikes. He's been curried. Update on EF's grippe (Sat.): The curry plaster helped a bit, but not enough. The next day I hauled EF to the reliable cevicheria Punto Azul to get him some chupe pescado (fish soup) with aji and lime juice added. That helped open things up. Later that night, he steamed his head over a bowl of hot water and eucalyptus oil, which made him feel a lot better. He's been doing that regularly and was well enough today to have a meeting in San Isidro.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/feed/ 9 Moby Dick, Herman Melville & “Strange, Sad” Lima http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:49:58 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=454 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
"...like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two"
Rereading yesterday's post on writers and Lima's weather, I became curious about Herman Melville's riff on Lima as "the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see."  When did Melville visit Lima? What prompted him to go into spasms of melancholy? A quick Google search revealed that the quote doesn't belong to Melville, per se, but rather to Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick.  The novel revolves around an embittered seaman, Captain Ahab, who is consumed with hunting down and killing the white albino whale who caused him to lose his leg. In Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishamel begins:
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
That statement opens the door to a hallucinatory series of free-associations on  "whiteness" and albinoism, and how that quality can inspire terror, especially if it's a big white carnivorous whale you're talking about. In his metaphorical twistings and turnings, the narrator seizes on Lima as an example of a lifeless "white" city, one dominated by Pizarro's legacy of white colonialism, with its racial and class divisions:
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of her skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;- it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
The narrator is spot on when it comes to some of Lima's low points: "cathedral-toppling" earthquakes, rough seas, and lack of rain (the "tearlessness of her skies"), natural phenomena that exist today. The city's architecture is what really gets his goat, however (it seems that the narrator visits Lima right after an earthquake has wrecked everything). The narrator's description of Lima in ruins is drawn from Melville's own observations of the city in 1844, when he sailed to Peru as a crew member on the USS United States. Literary scholars have been fascinated by Melville's obsession with the city of Lima.  The anthology Melville "Among the Nations" (edited by Sanford Marovitz and A.C. Christodoulou) includes a chapter by Wyn Kelly on Moby Dick and "The Style of Lima." Kelly's chapter is worth a read, especially as it probes Melville's hatred of the European conquest of Peru and how he invokes that disgust through descriptions of Lima's Plaza de Armas.
Herman Melville
Author Herman Melville
Melville was deeply shaken by his visit to Lima in 1844, and in his imagination, the city's Spanish-style architecture and its ruins expressed the "barbarism at the heart of urban civilization," Kelly says. I'd bet 100 soles Melville visited Lima during winter.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/feed/ 7 Desperately Seeking Sunlight http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:49:58 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=454 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
"...like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two"
Rereading yesterday's post on writers and Lima's weather, I became curious about Herman Melville's riff on Lima as "the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see."  When did Melville visit Lima? What prompted him to go into spasms of melancholy? A quick Google search revealed that the quote doesn't belong to Melville, per se, but rather to Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick.  The novel revolves around an embittered seaman, Captain Ahab, who is consumed with hunting down and killing the white albino whale who caused him to lose his leg. In Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishamel begins:
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
That statement opens the door to a hallucinatory series of free-associations on  "whiteness" and albinoism, and how that quality can inspire terror, especially if it's a big white carnivorous whale you're talking about. In his metaphorical twistings and turnings, the narrator seizes on Lima as an example of a lifeless "white" city, one dominated by Pizarro's legacy of white colonialism, with its racial and class divisions:
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of her skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;- it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
The narrator is spot on when it comes to some of Lima's low points: "cathedral-toppling" earthquakes, rough seas, and lack of rain (the "tearlessness of her skies"), natural phenomena that exist today. The city's architecture is what really gets his goat, however (it seems that the narrator visits Lima right after an earthquake has wrecked everything). The narrator's description of Lima in ruins is drawn from Melville's own observations of the city in 1844, when he sailed to Peru as a crew member on the USS United States. Literary scholars have been fascinated by Melville's obsession with the city of Lima.  The anthology Melville "Among the Nations" (edited by Sanford Marovitz and A.C. Christodoulou) includes a chapter by Wyn Kelly on Moby Dick and "The Style of Lima." Kelly's chapter is worth a read, especially as it probes Melville's hatred of the European conquest of Peru and how he invokes that disgust through descriptions of Lima's Plaza de Armas.
Herman Melville
Author Herman Melville
Melville was deeply shaken by his visit to Lima in 1844, and in his imagination, the city's Spanish-style architecture and its ruins expressed the "barbarism at the heart of urban civilization," Kelly says. I'd bet 100 soles Melville visited Lima during winter.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/feed/ 7 An American in Lima » Lima weather http://americaninlima.com slices of my life in Peru Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:55:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 How to (Maybe) Cure a Lima Chest Cold http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:03:18 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=476 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
Adult men do dress as mustard bottles...sometimes
Sr. Mostazo
El Fotografo can't kick this chest cold he's been suffering with for three weeks. Not even the schlep to Santa Eulalia last weekend could knock it out of his system.  So I decided to try a home remedy on him that I read about in Suite 101. Now EF's lying in bed swathed in poultices and blankets, just four feet away from me, and the room reeks of Indian food. Let me explain. Earlier this morning I read about this great mustard plaster (also known as a "poultice") you can make to get rid of lingering chest congestion. That home remedy sounded right for what's ailing EF: For three weeks he's been taking Robitussin and Paltomiel (a Peruvian homeopathic cough syrup), drinking hot tea with honey and popping vitamin Cs to no effect. Something stronger (stranger?) was in order. The mustard plaster recipe caught my eye because I remember as a kid seeing a movie in which some orphaned kids who live in the country subject their sick landlord (played by Harry Dean Stanton) to an intense cure involving a poultice of hot cooked onions. The film is based on the classic children's novel Where the Lilies Bloom, by Bill and Vera Cleaver, and that onion scene has always stayed with me. In that scene Stanton's character, whose name is Kaiser Pease, is on his deathbed wearing these tragic-looking long-johns, and the orphans give him a bath in the onions, long-johns and all.
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
Kaiser Pease getting his onion poultice in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974 film)
The treatment works, Kaiser lives, and I think he marries the oldest girl (the one with the brown hair in the film still). EF isn't as sick as Kaiser Pease, but I figured a stinky poultice might have a transformative effect on him. Now comes the part of the story where it gets that Lima twist. The recipe for a mustard plaster calls for mustard powder. You mix it with flour and hot water, and the hot water activates the mustard's chemical compounds, creating a thick paste that heats up on its own. You can't use prepared mustard out of a squeeze bottle. (I searched that on Google too.) It has to be dried mustard powder or mustard seeds that you grind yourself. Supermarkets in the United States carry mustard powder, but this being Peru, I wasn't sure Wong would have it. As I found out this morning, they don't. "Ah," one employee told me, "Cordon Bleu makes polvo de mostaza." He smiled. "Sorry, we don't carry that brand." After searching ten more minutes among the spices, I found a jar of Badia curry powder, which contains powdered mustard.  That was the closest I'd come, I decided. "Why not aji?" the Wong employee asked. I bought a packet of that for good measure. So now EF's been lying here for half an hour with a towelful of curry/aji paste tucked under his t-shirt. The curry mixture didn't get extremely hot like the mustard paste is supposed to, but it did warm his chest. Prior to applying the poultice, I smeared him with olive oil so the spices wouldn't irritate his skin. The instructions said to do that. EF is hacking up mucus. "It's working," he says. "I wasn't coughing up anything before." We just peeled off the poultice. I wiped off the oil on his chest with a napkin. It came away bright yellow, the color of mustard and tumeric and aji. Yikes. He's been curried. Update on EF's grippe (Sat.): The curry plaster helped a bit, but not enough. The next day I hauled EF to the reliable cevicheria Punto Azul to get him some chupe pescado (fish soup) with aji and lime juice added. That helped open things up. Later that night, he steamed his head over a bowl of hot water and eucalyptus oil, which made him feel a lot better. He's been doing that regularly and was well enough today to have a meeting in San Isidro.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/03/how-to-maybe-cure-a-lima-chest-cold/feed/ 9 Moby Dick, Herman Melville & “Strange, Sad” Lima http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:49:58 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=454 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
"...like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two"
Rereading yesterday's post on writers and Lima's weather, I became curious about Herman Melville's riff on Lima as "the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see."  When did Melville visit Lima? What prompted him to go into spasms of melancholy? A quick Google search revealed that the quote doesn't belong to Melville, per se, but rather to Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick.  The novel revolves around an embittered seaman, Captain Ahab, who is consumed with hunting down and killing the white albino whale who caused him to lose his leg. In Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishamel begins:
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
That statement opens the door to a hallucinatory series of free-associations on  "whiteness" and albinoism, and how that quality can inspire terror, especially if it's a big white carnivorous whale you're talking about. In his metaphorical twistings and turnings, the narrator seizes on Lima as an example of a lifeless "white" city, one dominated by Pizarro's legacy of white colonialism, with its racial and class divisions:
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of her skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;- it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
The narrator is spot on when it comes to some of Lima's low points: "cathedral-toppling" earthquakes, rough seas, and lack of rain (the "tearlessness of her skies"), natural phenomena that exist today. The city's architecture is what really gets his goat, however (it seems that the narrator visits Lima right after an earthquake has wrecked everything). The narrator's description of Lima in ruins is drawn from Melville's own observations of the city in 1844, when he sailed to Peru as a crew member on the USS United States. Literary scholars have been fascinated by Melville's obsession with the city of Lima.  The anthology Melville "Among the Nations" (edited by Sanford Marovitz and A.C. Christodoulou) includes a chapter by Wyn Kelly on Moby Dick and "The Style of Lima." Kelly's chapter is worth a read, especially as it probes Melville's hatred of the European conquest of Peru and how he invokes that disgust through descriptions of Lima's Plaza de Armas.
Herman Melville
Author Herman Melville
Melville was deeply shaken by his visit to Lima in 1844, and in his imagination, the city's Spanish-style architecture and its ruins expressed the "barbarism at the heart of urban civilization," Kelly says. I'd bet 100 soles Melville visited Lima during winter.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-strange-sad-lima/feed/ 7 Desperately Seeking Sunlight http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/01/desperately-seeking-sunlight/ http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/01/desperately-seeking-sunlight/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:51:51 +0000 Barbara http://americaninlima.com/?p=443 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
Valley of Santa Eulalia, which has lots of sun, lots of rocks and amazing avocado ice cream
Valley of Santa Eulalia, Peru, which has sun, big rocks and amazing avocado ice cream
There is no sun in Lima during the South American winter. No shifting light. No shadows. No way to tell 8 a.m. from 5 p.m. Just a flat grey sky that stays put, like lint in the dryer basket. I wrote about this yesterday in "Panzo de Burro" and now I'm at it again. This week I'm writing about the weather in Lima because it defines the city. And like many elemental things, it goes unnoticed but influences nearly everything. The sunless Lima winter is strange, bordering on freakish. Surviving a Lima winter is like living on another planet -- a planet where there is no sun, only a weak light reflected from, say, another moon. But since there is sunlight in Lima from December through March, Limenos know that there's a sun up there, and they cling to that knowledge. The sun will come back, the Limenos think. It will, it will. Sunlight is always in the back of a Limeno's mind. Thus on the rare winter's day when the sun does poke through for a few hours, Limenos act in a way that strikes outsiders as exaggerated. Que rico! El sol! they'll exclaim, their voices high-pitched and giddy. The que ricos! go on for a while; the Limenos are smiling; they're laughing; they're hysterical. These are people who haven't seen a crack of sunlight in six weeks. A few hours later, the sun disappears into the garua fog, the shadows fade into the sidewalk, Limenos retreat into their normally sombre demeanors. I know this because I have watched El Fotografo's relatives undergo this transformation. The first time was in 2000, when we were visiting from Florida for a few weeks. I didn't understand at the time what was going on. I thought that perhaps some of the relatives were bipolar. Now that I have lived through one Lima winter and am enduring a second, I have more insight. Their (my) reaction isn't a sign of mental imbalance; it's a natural reaction to being given a sudden reprive from months of sunlight deprivation. The response probably has a clinical name. It's about sunlight and the pituarity gland and maybe the release of yet-unnamed hormones. We are desperately seeking sunlight. The place where EF, EH and I visited this weekend is called Santa Eulalia, an impossible word for a gringa to pronounce: ay-oo-LAH-lee-ah. It sounds like someone gargling. Why does one go to Santa Eulalia-ia-ia?  To feel sunlight on one's face. (Actually, it's also a magnet for bird-lovers, something I didn't know on Friday when I posted "Extreme Bird Love, That" prior to leaving Lima for the weekend. Santa Eulalia also is home to a center for training Peace Corps volunteers.) The town of Santa Eulalia is about an hour and a half east of Lima. Getting there involves nagivating horrific traffic and barren stretches of highway, and dust, dust, dust everywhere. Once you get to Eulalia, there's more dust; however, there are bougainvilla poking over the fences and so it is a picturesque dust. Up bumpy roads and past concrete brick compounds, tall eucalyptus trees bathed in dust, dusty dogs barking dry coughs, roadside stands with local women selling homemade avocado ice cream (!), dust on the seats where you sit to eat the ice cream. At the end of a 20-minute climb up a dirt/dust/rock road, there is the very nice house that you rent with a bunch of people, and everyone is saying Que linda! Because it is. It's in the sunlight. It's shining on everything. You can see your shadow and you feel human again.]]> http://americaninlima.com/2008/09/01/desperately-seeking-sunlight/feed/ 1