The author of On Mexican Time, Tony Cohan, will present a PEN talk about his new book, Mexican Days: Journeys into the Heart of Mexico, at the Bellas Artes Auditorium on June 29 at 6pm. Since its publication in May, Mexican Days has received rave reviews and is selling briskly.

Author Wayne Greenhaw caught up with Tony in the midst of his busy touring schedule to converse with him and write this for us.


In his latest book, Mexican Days: Journeys into the Heart of Mexico, Tony Cohan evokes the ghosts seen and heard and felt by earlier classical literary visitors to this country richly layered with philosophical dreams: Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, William Spratling and Gabriel García Márquez, to name only a few.

Beginning with the surreal setting of filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and the unruly band of actors-Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe and Mickey Rourke-who took over the streets of San Miguel while shooting Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the author walks the cobblestones of this town he made famous with his book On Mexican Time.

Strolling through town and swimming through the canals of La Gruta, Cohan, a Californian who moved to San Miguel back in the '80s, brings our hillside town to life with the muscular vitality of his writing. And when he moves out of San Miguel to the mountains of Sierra Gorda to Edward James's Las Pozas, the missions of Junípero Serra, Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Coyoacán, the Oaxaca of artist Francisco Toledo, the tiny winding streets of Guanajuato, the beautiful and unusual weeping city of Xalapa and the strangely evocative little town of Tlacotalpan, he brings back wonderful memories of my own wanderings through this country.

But Tony Cohan has his own unique vision of Mexico as he peers behind the scenes and reports poetically and profoundly about this world.

W.G. Tony, let's start with your recurring theme of your "fugue" at the beginning and end of Mexican Days. Would you talk a bit about that idea? Like when your friend Lauren writes and asks you about it?

T.C. Before I began the travels that make up Mexican Days, I was already in the grips of quite a wanderlust.

During one trip, somewhere in Asia, I came across a description of a medical condition called "dissociative fugue," in which people suddenly take off and travel for no apparent reason. Half-seriously, half in jest, I began to identify with this condition and wonder if it was an affliction I'd fallen prey to. It haunts the book, as my travels through Mexico almost become a way of life and I have a hard time settling back down in San Miguel.

W.G. I love so much about Mexican Days. It's difficult to pick one section to explore. But your description of the Candelaria celebration at Tlacotalpan brought back wonderful memories of a sunlit summer afternoon I spent there years ago.

It's like a lovely woman who says nothing but smiles sensuously. You know there's something mysterious behind the brilliant facade. Speak a bit about the layers you peeled back in your several days there, if you will.

T.C. I'm so glad you mentioned that chapter. I admit it's one of my favorites in the book. You've visited Tlacotalpan, Wayne, so you know that it's this elegant old river delta town south of Vera Cruz filled with multicolored colonnades, porches and porticos. It looks almost like old New Orleans in miniature. In its heyday the great Atlantic ships disembarked there. I quote the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska: "Whenever we wish to smile, we think of Tlacotalpan." Every January, Tlacotalpan lights up for a three-day Candelaria fiesta of religious processions, bull runs and music. From dusk to dawn every night the plazas fill with son jarocho bands and fandango dancers. While I was there, I came across traces of a folklorist and musicologist known as the gringo jarocho who worked in that region a couple of generations back, and he became my secret guide into Tlacotalpan's mysteries. 

W.G. Thanks, Tony. I was enchanted by that chapter, reminding me of my own afternoon in Tlacotalpan. Many other parts of your book also held me mesmerized. Your words about the surrealist Edward James took me back to one of my early summers in San Miguel in the late 1950s. There was a young Mexican guy who hung out in the Cucaracha bar under the Allende portales. He talked about going up into the mountains and seeing this British artist who was building all these crazy statues in the jungle. Unfortunately I've never gotten up there, but you draw a very clear word picture of the place. Could you elaborate on that as well as the missions near Xilitla?

T.C. Quite a few people in San Miguel have visited the Sierra Gorda region, or at least know of it. In fact, a San Miguel woman was briefly Edward James's private secretary until he demanded she work in the nude! The artist Pedro Friedeberg, who lived here for many years, knew Edward James and created work for him. Edward James was a bona fide wealthy English eccentric, a collector and confidante of Magritte, Dali and others. He built this personal "art park" in the orchid jungles high above the Vera Cruz coast, about a six-hour drive from here. The visit I take in the book turns into a surprising encounter with someone from my past at El Castillo, James's former house, now a bed-and-breakfast. A huge bonus to that journey is the encounter with the first five missions built by the Franciscan monk Junípero Serra in the beautiful mountain valleys around Jalpan.

W.G. Tony, you round out Mexican Days so nicely, coming back to San Miguel. Would you talk a bit about what you found? And tell a bit about the emotions you felt? Is your fugue satisfied these days?

TC: The book ends a year later, back in San Miguel, the movie crew long gone, the magazine piece in and published, the changes in house and town and my own life moving along apace. Something in me has been laid to rest, yet the wanderlust, the "fugue," is still stirring. I'll leave it to the reader to discover how this plays out in the end.



PEN lecture by Tony Cohan
Thursday, June 29, 6pm, Auditorium, Bellas Artes, Hernández Macías 75





Authors' Sala continues reading series
By Linda Sorin

The San Miguel Authors' Sala continues its special series with a second evening of its very popular readings from works in progress. Two writers, Linda Schor and Halvard Johnson, will read fiction and poetry, respectively.


Halvard Johnson 
Johnson's newest poetry collection, Guide to the Tokyo Subway, is just out from Hamilton Stone Editions. He lives in New York City. Here is the title poem from Guide to the Tokyo Subway: 


Guide to the Tokyo Subway

At Shinjuku Station
one entrance is haunted

by the spirit of a lost traveler
one who missed her train

and never found her way
around or through

that incredibly
personal disaster

passing by, I lower my head
-I who am lost every day-

feeling I ought to
have met her
*
how many foreigners
dream of walking where we do
now
along the palace moat
speaking of this and that
-keep, keep moving-
not even wondering
where the next bottle
of beer will come from
*
there's a circle line 
around the central city 
on which you could ride forever
for a one-stop fare

but the trains here don't 
run all night long
so you must get off somewhere
-be quiet, be quiet-
don't ask me where
*
in dreams
we wander through
mazes of tunnels

and passageways
underground
-hush, hush-
in the dark corridors

turnings
stairways
and escalators smoothly

sliding downward
*
coming up from below
my eyes take their time
adjusting to daylight

a crowd of commuters surge
past me down the steps
at a trot, at a trot

suddenly you stand before me
having walked all that way
just to meet me

we have sandwiches
and tea together
before deciding to separate
leaving to others
the end of our
carefully rehearsed story
*
I know that at Ueno
a long time coming
cherry blossoms
glisten in lamplight
-go under, go under-
and nighttime's the best time
for viewing sakura, sipping sake
*
what I said
there in the station
was not what I 
meant to

meanings stretch out
in all directions
turn back, turn back
on themselves

on their central 
unmeaning 
*
I'd always thought
that if I positioned myself
just so,
as the train pulled
into the station
certain forces would come
into play, changing
my outlook on things
in surprising ways

the train would transport me
to a distant station
with an unfamiliar name
in an unfamiliar script
and I would get off
happy to be alive
not knowing which way to turn

Reading San Miguel Authors' Sala
Works in Progress by Linda Schor & Halvard Johnson
Friday, June 23, 5pm to 7pm, Posada San Francisco, Plaza Principal 2, 50 pesos, includes wine reception