Jon Cotner + Andy Fitch + Maggie Nelson
Book Reading and Release for:
Ten Walks/Two Talks
by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch
Cotner and Fitch will be reading
+ Maggie Nelson will also be reading new work
Sunday, December 12, 7pm
Ten Walks/Two Talks combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around Manhattan with a pair of roving dialogues—one of which takes place during a late-night "philosophical" ramble through Central Park. Mapping 21st-century New York, Cotner and Fitch update the meandering and meditative form of Basho's travel diaries to construct a descriptive/dialogic fugue.
"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
"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
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch recently completed the collaboration called Conversations over Stolen Food. Fitch’s Not Intelligent, but Smart: Rethinking Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. Ten Walks/Two Talks is their latest book.
Maggie Nelson’s books include The Art of Cruelty, and Bluets. Recent books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes and Jane: A Murder. Nelson is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, and contributes to Artforum, Bookforum, and Cabinet.
posted by kramer at 4:14 PM
0 comments
Book Reading and Release for:
Ten Walks/Two Talks
by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch
Cotner and Fitch will be reading
+ Maggie Nelson will also be reading new work
Sunday, December 12, 7pm
Ten Walks/Two Talks combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around Manhattan with a pair of roving dialogues—one of which takes place during a late-night "philosophical" ramble through Central Park. Mapping 21st-century New York, Cotner and Fitch update the meandering and meditative form of Basho's travel diaries to construct a descriptive/dialogic fugue.
"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
"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
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch recently completed the collaboration called Conversations over Stolen Food. Fitch’s Not Intelligent, but Smart: Rethinking Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. Ten Walks/Two Talks is their latest book.
Maggie Nelson’s books include The Art of Cruelty, and Bluets. Recent books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes and Jane: A Murder. Nelson is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, and contributes to Artforum, Bookforum, and Cabinet.
posted by kramer at 4:14 PM
0 comments
Post a Comment
Go Back