Farina referencess

[Dkipen at aol.com]

On the ever-worth-risking dangers of inreading:

In college and well under the influence of TRP, I once found a cutout copy of
a two-LP Farina retrospective. I'd heard there was a track called V., and
sure enough I listened to it and the rest with copious satisfaction. What I
couldn't understand was, why had no one pointed out the presence of another
track, obviously just as Pynchon-relevant, entitled "Tommy Makem Fantasy"?
There were no lyrics, but Farina was plainly engaging in a little playful
Injun-speak, on the order of "Heap Big Chief Smokem Peace Pipe," and suchlike
truck. Our Tommy makes fantasies, does he not, and besides, how else to
explain the GenXorably Pynchonesque melodic feints and darts, the paranoid
swoops of autoharp tempo, the God knows what else...
Well, depressingly recently, I discovered that there is or was in fact a
fairly well-known Irish folk musician by the name of, say it with me, Tommy
Makem. Tommy Makem Fantasy has, it appears, nothing to do with anybody's
racially insensitive pidgin droppings but my own, and represents instead the
very common practice of titling one's own compositions after the work of a
predecessor, as for example Fantasy on a Theme of Pickaninny, - make that
Rhapsody, but you get the idea. (O, this Correctitude, it doth make
Tourette's of us all.) 
Anyway, Chasened, Trocked and Mocamboed, I now know the perils of heedless
inreading: not unlike inbreeding, it makes your kids look like idiots. Not
that I'm stopping. I just found out there's a character named Tom Pinch in
Martin Chuzzlewit. Theories, anybody? As another Tom used to say, let's not
always see the same hands. (Oh hell, Lehrer, I hate it when youse gets
obscure, why should I do likewise?) When it comes to overzealous
interpretation, I'm still hoping that practice makem perfect. I know now that
haste makem WASTE.
Your most appreciative sometime lurker,
David