Customer Reviews

Ten Walks/Two Talks

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

I was reading books less frequently than I should when I found Ten Walks/Two Talks; they seemed to require too much stepping-out from my increasingly busy mental existence. Ten Walks/Two Talks is instead as rooted in the world as the reader, and its conversations are as simple or dense as a reader wishes them to be. While Jon and Andy might appear to slow down their own experience through dialogue and reflection, I felt a quickness in reading, along with the rare sensation that much, much more could be gained from the time that I have.

Ten Walks/Two Talks is a refreshing read. It captures the spirit and ephemerality of urban living that so often is glorified and misrepresented in literature. These quick walks read like poetry, hectic but composed. I enjoy getting caught up in the rush of a New York street. No one has the same experience, nor can any words capture it all, but these attempts frame things nicely. The talks between Cotner and Fitch are meandering and honest. All twelve incidents fit like small pieces of an urban experience that is far greater than us and is not timely but timeless.

The two authors spend time in New York supermarkets, documenting their free-ranged meals, or take long circulatory walks through the night in Manhattan. They somehow manage to transform these moments into a palimpsest for their otherworldly Proustian dialogue. A range of conversations are broached: monumental texts, sleeping patterns, and off-the-cuff, immediate observations flow in tangents. Neither a post-modern project nor self-aggrandizing preening, I imagine this is how people might've talked in the 18th Century when walking and talking were the rage.

What do you get when you cross David Antin's talk poems, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, and Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"? Ten Walks/Two Talks. That's what. This book by Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch composed in four parts, depicts the urban ecosystem as its living, breathing protagonist. Here New York plays the hero. A constellation of character sketches, including, "two blonds...thrilled to be tall," the "guys losing hair color, sporting metallic tones, with refined but somewhat stodgy taste in music," and a "scared spaniel" form the aleatory action of the book. The reader is met with meditations about American Elms and references to Thoreau and Emerson; the writer is met with a guy carrying a load of bricks. Everything and nothing happens in this book. That's the beauty of it. That, and the artistic recollection of the scenes. In addition to the Hiroshige frontispieces, there are brilliant washes of color throughout the book. The authors' cogitation of the lavender sky evolves into conversation about Japanese paintings. Descriptions of the city contain this precise attention, like when we find "one Asian girl in gold tights and sneakers" who "helped an ancient couple cross Catherine. Upon close inspection all three looked gray." I can imagine these lines coming from the study of a painting. But no, this is these men's lives, recorded in technicolor and consonance.

The four parts (Early Spring, Early Winter, Late Spring, and Late Winter) alternate between promenades and conversations. The conversations were recorded and later formatted into an alternating dialogue, which, formally, doesn't do justice to the sometimes-simultaneous talking. There are points when the authors' sentences collide, and I wonder what other layout could have better reflected the movement of the conversation. That aside, (or perhaps partially as a result of the way the two's sentences fold into each other in this alternating, democratic way) when these guys are talking to each other, the "I" becomes indistinguishable in a productive way. This melting-pot of the first person pronoun in the talk sections, combined with the ambiguity of the first person authorship in the walk sections, furthers New York as the principal figure. Cotner and Fitch are in the city and a part of it--both the seer and the seen. In this way the book is almost Whitmanian in its expanse and envelopment of every man, except that the purpose of this book is not to name a new America, but rather to record the haphazard events that make up two people's lives as they move through busy streets (or sip tea at W. F.)

The book is poetic, eclectic, meditative, and revealing. I am left feeling like a voyeur--eavesdropping on a friendship. And I feel strangely a part of that friendship--like I've made two new friends whom I can't wait to hear from again soon.

Reviewer Wayne Koestenbaum says in his Amazon/Ugly Ducking Press review that the writers "sweetly Oulipian sentences give back to the ordinary its modicum of glow." Oulipian? An unusual word, but Koestenbaum is right, and an understanding of "Oulipian" helped me make sense of this unusual, interesting book.

[Excerpted from the Wikipedia dictionary.] 'Oulipian' is an acronym from the French phrase: ''uvroir de littérature potentielle;' roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature" ...it is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques.... The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy."

I don't know if author's Cotner & Fitch consider themselves Oulipians, but '10 Walks/Two Talks' does offer a "new structure and pattern"' for authors with its intimate, free-flowing language positing around the NY landscape, and this makes for a curious, interesting read. It reminds me of other experimental works (Movies: Swimming to Cambodia, My Dinner with Andre - Literature: assorted stream-of-consciousness works, Shanks Mare.) This approach (walk/talk, consider) is loose and enjoyable, offering visual/poetically descriptive evocations of the New York landscape, flavored by the casual intimacy of old friends.

Yet in the end the work comes off as driftless - unanchored. Snippets of philosophy, but only a dollop, and context isn't easy to follow. I wish (being a geographer, and unfamiliar with New York City) that the book included a map of the jaunts, and had more dialogue between the participants regarding the landscape and their free-flowing thoughts. This book references New York for New Yorkers, and non-NYC'ers will find it hard-going to visualize and understand some of the NYC references.

My larger issue: a work like this is dependent upon the good humor and intelligence of the authors ~ and both seem capable and curious. Yet the book doesn't go far enough in the conversations between these intelligent authors. Much light patter and good humor, but only a smattering of insight, consideration, or awareness of 'self' within the landscape/philosophical world. Mind, it's a good read, but I wish they'd kept the tape recorder going for a few monologues, a few rants, and trusted in both themselves and the reader in taking it further.

Final thoughts: The idea behind the book is clever, and the execution pleasurable, but as an intellectual exercise it falls short of the goal ~ the authors pulled back when they needed to go further. That said, this is one of the more interesting books I've read this year.

This highly readable book of creative nonfiction is full of unique observations, which succeed in creating a an atmospheric portrait of life in modern New York City. For anyone who has lived there, it will remind you of your former/current home, for anyone who hasn't, there is no better introduction.

The 10 walks consist of a series of poetic fragments, which come together to make a whole. While the 2 talks transcribe the philosophic observations of the two author. Both sections are clearly the work of two practiced, observant and creative artists.

Funny and fast book. You can finish it in an hour but it sticks with you. I've already read it three times.