Ten Walks/Two Talks [Paperback]

Jon Cotner (Author), Andy Fitch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2010

"Magic... A new way of moving through our worlds." 
--The Boston Phoenix
 
"Fantastic... A deceptively simple book, TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS demands little but offers much. Cotner and Fitch invite us to experience our city with fresh pleasure and renewed awe." 
--Time Out New York 
 
"TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS is not a destination; it's a gentle journey with a pair of companionable friends." 
--The Stranger 
 
"Unusually quiet and beautiful... This book isn't like anything I'd encountered before." 
--Time Out Chicago
 
"A clever, well-executed investigation of the poetics of the commonplace." 
--BOMB Magazine
 
"Hilarious... Walkers, you have found your Socrateses." 
--The Austin Chronicle
 
"TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS helps instill what is too frequently missing from books on buildings: the experience of the city." 
--A Daily Dose of Architecture
 
"TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS is an associative journey where scents, noises, people, and buildings are meticulously described through the eyes of intensely attentive explorers." 
--The Architect's Newspaper
 
"I hate exercise, and I hate conversation, but I love TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS."
--HTMLGIANT
 
"Cotner and Fitch's conversations zigzag between the philosophic and the comedic." 
--Paper Magazine
 
"I've noticed more since I read TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS. I've listened more. It's made me feel better. This is a gift, a beautiful book, and nothing in it is forgettable." 
--Bookslut
 

TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around New York City with a pair of roving dialogues--one of which takes place during a late-night ramble through Central Park.

 

Editorial Reviews

Review

Like the propositions of Brainard, Schuyler, or Wittgenstein, Andy Fitch's declarations of ambulatory fact--of "mere" observation--are barbed with genius: clever, defamiliarizing, cushioned by a hum of meditative stillness. His sweetly Oulipian sentences give back to the ordinary its modicum of glow. And when he starts talking with the profound Jon Cotner, a latter-day Plato, we remember that philosophical inquiries have every right to take root in daily curiosities and drolleries, like the "smell of hip-cream," or the metonymic relation of "my first oral sex experience" to the "mace flavor" of a cup of tea. Neurasthenia never had finer spokesmen. --Wayne Koestenbaum

Perambulating with Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch in TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS makes me wonder if conversation leads anywhere, nowhere, or everywhere. Their meandering is an aesthetic and intellectual stretch, since they walk and think artfully, poetry in motion. Maybe 21st century dandies or rootless homeboys, they observe the unexpected in urban landscapes, notice people stunned or easy. Their weirdly astute dialogues flirt with being a novel or a play of manners. What stops them in their tracks or starts them? Why are they fascinated by what fascinates them? Their boasts, vulnerability, and modesty presume a profound and unusual friendship, itself in motion, treading on and between the lines. --Lynne Tillman

Perhaps it was in the 5th century--I know this for a fact--that a certain government official in China chose to drop out of public life and devote himself to music and poetry, drunkenness and pure conversation. Soon he had a group of friends who had also left their "lives" and this group became poster children for the ideal life in Asia for a very long time. Even today. When Jon and Andy walk around Manhattan talking about things I feel like they are a moving page from that very fine idea in which small talk is large and nothing is more interesting or full or more entrancing than allowing the city to model for you--and walking among it too, becoming it. --Eileen Myles

About the Author

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch are the authors of TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2010 by THE WEEK, THE MILLIONS, TIME OUT CHICAGO, and BOOKSLUT. They recently completed another collaboration called CONVERSATIONS OVER STOLEN FOOD. Cotner and Fitch have performed their dialogic improvisations across the United States and internationally. Fitch's book NOT INTELLIGENT, BUT SMART: RETHINKING JOE BRAINARD is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Cotner teaches in Pratt Institute's Creative Writing Program. Fitch teaches in the University of Wyoming's MFA Program.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (January 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193325467X
• ISBN-13: 978-1933254678
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #256,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Settle In and Listen Up, March 26, 2010

By 

Vanessa Carlisle (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ten Walks/Two Talks (Paperback)

Idiosyncratic descriptions. Real conversations. Men in the city trying to understand. This is like a Goddard film on paper. Gorgeous and somehow melancholy--but not maudlin. For New York, which has been overrepresented, these representations are fresh and stinky, bright and clouded, and so they feel true, true, true.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tour de force, June 28, 2010

By 

Sir Scotty Wolftronix - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ten Walks/Two Talks (Paperback)

"Ten Walks" is a brilliant meditation on the modern city and mind, the product of two manbabies evoking, for the reader, what it must have felt like to be Moses emerging from his basket the first time. The smells, the light, the shadows, the constant murmur of New York come alive in this riveting random narrative of life in the present tense. Mr. Cotner and Mr. Fitch have shown us a new way to walk, and to see.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Charming little book, June 21, 2010

By 

Standard_Deviance (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ten Walks/Two Talks (Paperback)

Ten Walks/Two Talks is a quick read, but one that stays with you. Cotner and Fitch have an eye for idiosyncratic urban observation and their friendship as revealed in the talks is quirky and infectious.

The book does what poetry as its best can do: make you experience the world anew. For weeks after I read it, I walked through New York with a delightfully heightened awareness of its many small wonders and I imagine that would be the effect wherever you live.

My only complaint is that I wish the book were longer, so that it wouldn't have to end so soon.