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Jon Cotner

Andy Fitch

Ten Walks/Two Talks Paperback – January 15, 2010

by Jon Cotner (Author), Andy Fitch (Author)

9 ratings

3.7 on Goodreads

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"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.

Print length

88 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication date

January 15, 2010
Dimensions

4.75 x 0.25 x 7.25 inches
ISBN-10

193325467X
ISBN-13

978-1933254678
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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

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ugly Duckling Presse; First Print edition (January 15, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 88 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 193325467X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1933254678
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.75 x 0.25 x 7.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,198,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,434 in American Literature Criticism
- #74,867 in Poetry (Books)

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Jon Cotner
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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.
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Andy Fitch
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Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch are the authors of TEN WALKS/TWO TALKS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). They recently completed another collaborative manuscript 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 lives in New York City. Fitch is an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming's MFA Program.
See more on the author's page

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Andrew R. Briggs

A good read, but quiet when it should be loud

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 17, 2011

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.

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Jack

Don't Buy It

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 28, 2015

This book is pure crap. You're better off just buying $15 worth of toilet paper. Only thing this book is good for is wiping your ass. Whoever told Cotner he was a talented writer must not have known how to read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 26, 2010

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.

2 people found this helpful

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Sir Scotty Wolftronix

A tour de force

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 29, 2010

"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.

7 people found this helpful

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C. F. Hamilton

I love this book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 16, 2010

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.

3 people found this helpful

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R. Rooney

New York situations, Classical sensibilities

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 6, 2010

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.

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Ten Walks/Two Talks Paperback – January 15, 2010

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