Of Seemingly Unrelated Interests

I find it very satisfying when my interests come full circle. That is, when separate and seemingly unrelated interests meet and I realize that those interests had a pre-existing relationship that predates my interest in either one separately. Is there a name for this?

How about an example:

I’m not sure when I first heard Vampire Weekend, but I initially found them catchy and vaguely interesting. While prepping for an interview with Director Garth Jennings it came to my attention that he had directed the video for A-Punk, the first single  off of their self-titled debut. The video was innovative and, again, catchy. Once Jennings explained to me how he shot the video I had both a larger interest in him and Vampire Weekend. I bought the album, caught their show at the 9:30 Club when they came through DC and anticipate their upcoming release, Contra (which you can listen to now on their MySpace page*). But no, Jennings/VW is not the overlapping coincidence I am talking about. That was predicated by work, and was a more mutual/linear appreciation of one from the other.

Earlier this year I came across Caleb Crain’s blog, Steamboats are Ruining Everything via the controversy over his (harsh?) critique of Alain de Botton’s Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and de Botton’s (seemingly a bit irrational) response on Crain’s blog. Which was amusing, but beside the point. It was simply an entry point to Crain’s writing, which I instantly liked. I began following Crain’s blog and became a very interested reader.

Flash forward to last week. Reading Lizzie Widdicombe’s profile of Vampire Weekend in the New Yorker (sadly, not online; but here’s the abstract) I came across this entry about the genus of lead singer Ezra Koenig’s literary interests:

Caleb Crain, a former adjunct professor at Columbia, taught Koenig in a Mellville class, and read Koenig’s stories; he later became one of the first people to blog about his music. Crain said the stories “read as if Lydia Davis, with her oblique and hermetic sense of humor, were working with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s material.”

That’s … well, that’s something more than a coincidence.

*Shouldn’t MySpace just go ahead and change their tagline to “A place for bands“?