The coincidence of reading

If you look over at the right hand side, the most recent Picks of the Week include Jonathan Lethem’s MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN and Penn Jillette’sSOCK. Both books made a significant impression–in fact, I would have to say that Lethem’s novel will eventually rank as an all-time favorite–but as it happens, I read them back-to-back, which posed a number of challenges, both positive and negative.

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN takes the skeleton of a detective novel and cloaks it around an exploration of language, how to twist it, mutate it, contort it and produce entirely new phrases and words, all because the protagonist, Lionel Essrog, functions (I won’t say suffers, and if you read the book, you wouldn’t either) with Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s the kind of book that seeps into your brain and insiduously starts making you think Tourettically, in tics and spurts. The book was a joy to read, but it took me a bit longer than usual to finish–4 days–because the more I absorbed the prose, the more my brain started spitting back combinations of new phrases that I’d never thought to coin before.

Normally, I try to alternate books–light and dark, mystery and literary fiction, dense prose and brain-candy–so as not to overload my mind. But for whatever reason, probably because I was so psyched to get the book in my hands already, I moved on to Jillette’s first novel. It didn’t suffer by comparison, but my brain took a while to get used to the peculiar rhythms of the book, the endless bombardment of pop culture references (I got maybe half of them) and the sock monkey “voice.” SOCK is not an easy read, and it’s not exactly a linear one. So perhaps I didn’t make the wisest choice to make this book my next read. But sometimes, the brain works in mysterious ways, especially in matters of convergence.

I always read acknowledgements and dedications, which I think I’ve discussed before (if not, I certainly will at another time.) Lethem mentioned a lot of folks who helped him out directly and indirectly, and one such indirect influence were the poems of Tuli Kupferberg, founding member of the 60s radical musical troupe The Fugs and West Village denizen. I made a mental note because it seemed interesting and made a lot of sense. Then, about halfway in the middle of reading SOCK, I stopped dead, because amongst the stream-of-consciousness, there was a stray mention of Tuli Kupferberg.

To prove that all things really do happen in threes, a couple of years ago, my friend R–a fixture in the Yiddish culture and Jewish music scene in New York–rang me, wanting to know if I’d like to come along with her to a reading near NYU that evening with a couple of her friends. I didn’t have any other plans, so I agreed. I met them outside a tiny coffeeshop just minutes before the reading was to start. And that’s how I was introduced to the mind of Tuli Kupferberg.

Not that I knew who the hell he was at the time, and truthfully, I didn’t make that much of an effort to seek out his ouevre afterwards. It was an interesting evening, though considering he’s about 80 years old, his shambling derelict act seems more wistful than cutting-edge now. I kept wondering if someone was taking care of him. And yet, his influence is obviously far-reaching, if I’m coming across mentions of him in two completely separate books.

Still, the coincidence pricks at me in the same way another more common phenomenon often does: when I come across a word I’ve never seen before, look up the definition, and suddenly find it mentioned in a bunch of places right away. Were the words there before and I just never saw them before because I was blind, or did they magically appear in some metaphysical manner in order to support my subconscious? I’ll never know, but that–among many, many things–is what makes the act of reading such an extraordinary experience.