Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch are the authors of Ten Walks/Two Talks, from Ugly Duckling Presse. In 2009 they edited Interdisciplinary Transcriptions -- a 1,036-page digital anthology containing poets, critics, anthropologists and visual artists. Cotner and Fitch have performed their dialogic improvisations at festivals and conferences across the United States, as well as Toronto and Berlin. Cotner lives in New York City, where he is completing his Ph.D. for SUNY Buffalo's Poetics Program. Fitch is an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming's MFA Program.
In Ten Walks/Two Talks, collaborators Cotner and Fitch stride by us discoursing in a manner that could evoke Stein's continuous present or which just as easily might have overtones of Beckett's waiting around for something to happen. You can see I'm already struggling to place these two; the position of walking by, with, toward, or away from is evocatively indefinite in these performance texts, which might be plays, poems, travel diaries, or some other unspecified genre. I say unspecified because these are serial works; there isn't a narrative in the usual sense of closure or destination. What happens in the meantime? A lot of small talk--overheard small talk--which admits its surveilled status, sometimes with a wink, sometimes with deadpan accuracy. Now I'm going to quote a passage, coming up ahead here. Walking in language turns out to be about the metaphorical force of deictics, and the reader's ability to inhabit them or the comedy that occurs when this process fails:
"Oh, do you smell the pine?"
"Yeah, I do."
"Oh, it's a lovely smell, and those branches are a lovely pale green, do you notice?"
"Yeah, especially with the gold light."
If there's joking here, it might have something to do with what might be called in other contexts a transcendentalist impulse, but now received as secondhand, as a partially alienated discourse that takes into account a fuller range of bodily and environmental limits. If "the one actual link between some sort of idealized form and the particulars of momentary experience has been broken by, you know, human industrial production," we find ourselves in the midst of some rich and fraught material for writing, but there's never a sense of pedantry or trying too hard. On the contrary, what I love about this book is how charismatic, breezy, and deceptively accessible these dialogues are in their performance of surprise and joy. I love how directly they speak, and how many amazing particulars they discover in the richness of casual conversation. Please welcome Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch to the EOAGH Reading Series today.
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