On January 7th, Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch read from their newly-launched work, Ten Walks/Two Talks. McNally Jackson Books, the inviting cafe and bookstore at 52 Prince Street in Manhattan, regularly hosts daring young authors, though rarely with such an impressive turnout. As the stylish and scholarly audience took their seats and standing positions, the collaborating duo- whose work is modeled after the 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, among others, commenced an ambling aesthetic journey through the streets of New York City. After the reading, Cotner and Fitch discussed their project.
AP: What inspired you to start this project?
JC/AF: We had already begun work on two serial projects: Sixty Morning Walks (sixty consecutive mornings of sixty-minute walks through New York, each recorded as sixty-sentence entries), and Conversations over Stolen Food (transcripts of forty-five-minute conversations recorded in public—again, New York—over thirty straight days). But Ed Ruscha’s photographic books (Various Small Fires, Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, etc.) had also provided us with quirkier possibilities of what a book might be. Our favorite poets and philosophers, Basho and Socrates among them, frequently fused walking, thinking and talking. Combine these disparate influences, and you get Ten Walks/Two Talks.
AP: What do you want your readers to appreciate about the work?
JC/AF: We’ve long been interested in borrowing practices of additive composition from the realm of visual art. In Robert Rauschenberg’s combines or, more recently, Tara Donovan’s amazing plastic-cup installations, artists create unprecedented forms and scales—nearly impossible to visualize until the various parts get assembled. In Ten Walks/Two Talks, we wanted to apply this concept of additive composition to an almost exhausted literary-historical task: the critique of the unitary, observing “I”. Rather than dismantle any psychological perspective through disjunctive grammar, we hope to provide readers with a multivalent narrative “I”: sometimes singular, sometimes collective, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes fictive. We want to give readers the opportunity to read poetry, memoir, dialogue, novel and conceptual art all at once. This way they’ll have more time to appreciate the rest of life.
AP: How did you initially decide to collaborate? What’s unique about writing collaboratively?
JC/AF: With hundreds of undocumented walks and dialogues in our past, it seemed natural to begin recording these activities. You could say that walking and talking form the gears that drive our friendship. Many of the poets and philosophers we admire tend to work collaboratively. Christian Bök, for example, has recently collaborated with the Alice chatbot in order to—as he says—surprise himself. Bök could never anticipate how Alice would respond to his questions. This principle of surprise operates in Ten Walks/Two Talks. Our spontaneous dialogues come into being one word at a time—one syllable at a time, really. It’s impossible for us to predetermine how we’ll begin, what we’ll consider, where we’ll end up.
AP: Why New York City? How does the city contribute to your writing?
JC/AF: New York City is a more or less infinite zone for walking and talking. Sometimes we’ll joke that we have no imagination, that we can only work with the pre-given materials of daily life. Each day New York presents an abundance of such materials—things and events, words and scenarios, to be apprehended. At tonight’s reading, we moved from “Skyscrapers along the New Jersey coast all looked the same color as my personal checks” to “One storefront rivalled Milton's description of Chaos.” Perhaps we could have strained to imagine this combination of events. But for Ten Walks/Two Talks, the emphasis lies on a meditative attentiveness to the wild, accidental narratives that engage us whenever we step outside.
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