Andy Fitch and Jon Cotner's Ten Walks/Two Talks Puts NYC Under A Microscope

Publishing houses weren't sure what to do with Ten Walks/Two Talks when authors Andy Fitch and Jon Cotner were shopping their manuscript, a collection of ten deeply astute meditations on walking around Manhattan by Fitch, and two dialogues between the authors about walking. "People thought they were weird -- these pieces don't really fit into a genre," Fitch explained during a recent walk with Cotner near Madison Square Park. "They're not short stories, not poems, not interviews, but unfold within all of these genres." Fitch's walks are entrancing, meditative strolls through New York City, from Harlem to Chinatown, that capture the passing moments, sensations and thrilling impermanence of daily occurrences in urban settings. Inspired by walkers and talkers Socrates and Basho, Fitch and Cotner are our guides into the unknown territories of small talk and "microscopic urban phenomena," their conversations zigzagging between the philosophic and the comedic with the city as its backdrop. "We're not trying to reach a massive conclusion with this book," Cotner says, pointing out a Shiba Inu wearing a pearl necklace on Madison. "The conclusion," Fitch finishes, "is to pay attention." Below is an excerpt of one of Fitch's and Cotner's talks, conducted at a grocery store in Union Square, which they refer to as "W.F." for "legal reasons." (The authors' next collaboration is a collection of transcripts titled Conversations Over Stolen Food, which likely has something to do with this.)


Late Winter
Union Square W.F. (a natural grocery store), 8:30 p.m.

J: Great returning to Union Square W.F. -- the place where this whole project got conceived.

A: I especially like having a wall to our backs, a solid stomach filled by a well-balanced meal, and this rooibos tea. Thank you for it.

J: Do you like the rooibos?

A: I do; I associate its taste with color, a reddish color. Is the tea red...

J: Yes.

A: somehow? Or does the "roi" just make me think so? I'll sense a nice orangish, amberish, gleaming reddish hue on my tongue.

J: The tea's delicious. I'm happy to give it to you.

A: So where were you so long? While I waited?

J: Oh a man stood changing in the bathroom stall. Sorry it took so long. He entered wearing a biker's uniform and came out dressed for a waiter or host position.

A: Sure half my days I'll bring a change for the bathroom.

J: And you'll take your time changing as this man did? I imagine...

A: No, very rushed.

J: you'd rip through it.

A: I've once pulled muscles in my back getting a a foot stuck in pant-legs, thinking I'd taken them off when really I still sat entangled, yanking the waist and having my body follow.

J: Did you call in sick that day or or head to work?

A: I had just arrived. I packed the clothes and got down to...

J: Did you apply ice to your back?

A: No I didn't.

J: No.

A: I change clothes so much since I'll...we've said because we're Polish we sweat a tremendous amount. I'll worry I'm catching a cold from drafts I only feel because I've been perspiring.

J: Yeah, I've thought a lot about heritage lately. The other night somebody asked my heritage -- a girl. Often that amounts to a pick-up line right, getting people to...

A: The first thing she'd...

J: talk about themselves? Shortly after introducing ourselves she asked my heritage.

A: It might suggest "I am aware of you as a body."

J: Hmm.

A: "I'm trying to assimilate these characteristics into an understanding of who you are deep down inside."

J: And she seemed shocked by my answer: Part Polish, part Chinese and part Haitian.

A: Right.

J: A look of perplexity crossed her face, so I felt I should explain myself. I said I'd got some Polishness and some, some Polish and Germanic blood from my parents, but that from two influential roommates I'd gained Chinese and Haitian characteristics. For example, if I hang jogging clothes all over the apartment to dry I feel distinctly Haitian.

A: Could that could that...

J: This is something Mrs. Merlin would do.

A: She'd of course...

J: My eighty-year-old roommate on the Upper West Side.

 A: she of course wasn't jogging.

 J: She wasn't jogging, though she would not pay to have clothes dried, and would hang clothes on hangers throughout the apartment.

A: I think I recall a busy apartment -- with Mrs. Merlin applying cream to her hip in what looked like a crib to me.

 J: Oh that's her brass day-bed. She did not sleep in a crib (yet she could appear as tiny as an infant). You saw the brass day-bed, which her nephew purchased at a store on 112th.

A: Or I remember several stews cooking simultaneously...

J: Yes.

A: many afternoons.

J: Friends from the building used our kitchen. I'd assume they had their own fully operational kitchens, but inevitably they'd come cook enormous bowls, pots of stew.

A: Goat? Goat?

J: Goat meat factored into many recipes.

A: They did this to spend time with Mrs. M. do you think?

J: I think so.

A: I've pictured some apparatus in a shower stall, or just outside.

J: She kept a medical chair in the bathtub. Every morning, after waking and stretching though I didn't stretch first thing back then. Now I'd stretch first thing; but back then I stretched mid-afternoon.

A: It makes no sense.

J: It makes no sense, and if I had thought about it the slightest bit, if I had questioned that practice, I would've recognized its foolishness and revised it immediately. Yet it had gone unquestioned so long. Still anyway I would wake up, and the first thing I'd do, the first thing I'd touch, would be this hospital chair. I'd remove it from the bathtub...

A: Was it pink? I I...

J: It was pink, yes, as were the shower curtain...

A: Ok.

J: and floor-tiles, and the walls themselves stood painted pink.

A: I do remember...

J: [Voices] full pink bathroom.

A: a monochromatic sensation. Now I've...you couldn't put towels in the bathroom?

J: I'd left mine there the first week or so, but it acquired an awful smell.

A: From the room itself?

J: Well it made contact with Mrs. Merlin's towel, and ordinarily -- I mean which shocked me, since she herself I thought smelled nice...

A: Oh see, I'd wanted to say, I also remember the smell of hip-cream permeating not just the living-room and kitchen areas, but your bedroom as well.

J: Yeah.

A: I'll remember the smell of...

J: The smell of dead mice too, do you remember that smell?

A: Yeah I was going to say: I remember the smell of mice, stews, hip-cream, smoke (cigarette smoke) and altitude, tenth-floor altitude.

 J: Tenth floor. Most afternoons I'd [Voices] sun set over New Jersey. I'd sit reading Montaigne at my desk, smoking half-cigarettes, as was my style back then, and look out two windows toward pink sky.

A: I seem to recollect square pillows? Almost couch pillows?

 J: Mrs. Merlin, like most women I've met, had an excess of pillows. And the room came furnished with a half-dozen square pillows. Some nights you stayed until four-thirty before catching the first bus back to Astoria, where you lived then, and we would use these pillows. I'd spread some a across the bed and you'd sleep off bits of the hangover.

 A: I would wake with with contacts stuck flat to my eyeballs, in a way they never get from a full night's sleep, then exit with my organs shivering to catch an M-60 bus to Astoria. That fall I'd enter the bagel shop just as it opened -- 4:50 a.m.

J: Did the owners call you by name?

A: The man who opened this store didn't own it. He came from Central America and couldn't speak English, yet...

J: Were there any...

A: though still he recognized me.

J: So he showed signs of recognition?

A: Oh absolutely, and joy. He'd unlock both doors and face the the consequence cranky customers followed me in, but I was like the sun to that place.

J: And you'd enter a shop filled with warm bakery smells?

A: Yeah I'd watch conveyor-belts of bagels (somehow in water). They seemed to float like inner tubes. I don't know if you've seen a bagel operation like this.

J: I haven't.

Ten Walks/Two Talks is out now through Ugly Duckling Presse.