Ten Walks/Two Talks updates the meandering and meditative form of Basho’s travel diaries. Mapping 21st-century New York, Cotner and Fitch tap their predecessor’s collaborative tendencies in order to construct a descriptive/dialogic fugue. The book combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around Manhattan and a pair of dialogues about walking—one of which takes place during a late-night “philosophical” ramble through Central Park. 

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

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

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

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch have performed their dialogic improvisations at festivals and conferences across the United States, as well as in Toronto and Berlin. In 2007, Kenneth Goldsmith included an early excerpt from their now-completed book Conversations over Stolen Food in UbuWeb’s “Publishing the Unpublishable” Series. In 2008, Craig Dworkin published Andy’s Sixty Morning Walks on Editions Eclipse. More recently, Jon and Andy co-edited Interdisciplinary Transcriptions—a 1036-page digital anthology containing poets, critics, anthropologists and visual artists. Other publications include Animal Shelter (Semiotext(e)), Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Electric Literature, LIT, n+1 and Paper Monument. Jon lives in New York City, where he is finishing his Ph.D. for SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics Program. Andy is an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming’s MFA Program.

jon.cotner@gmail.com

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