And all I've done for want of wit to memory now I can't recall

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, all and sundry. In third or fourth grade, I remember we all got to wear shamrock-shaped nametags with Irishized (Gaelicized?) versions of our names on them. Mine was O'Taaffe, to which I pointed out that Taaffe was in fact Irish. Originally from Wales, perhaps; but hanging around a country long enough to become landed nobility must count for something. If I were in New Haven, I would celebrate by going to the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library and checking out the Carlingford Papers, a compilation of seventeenth-century correspondences between Theobald Taaffe, Earl of Carlingford, and his best buddy Charles II.* As it is, I listen to the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, the Dropkick Murphys, and whatever else turns up in iTunes under the proper subsection of "Folk." Hold the Guinness, green or otherwise.

But I have traded on my ancestry enough. Time for some shameless and wholly deserved pimpage. That chapbook of mine you saw a few entries ago? It's acquired some forthcoming siblings, by strange_selkie and yuki_onna, and glad I am of it. I've been waiting to see Jeannelle Ferreira's Dramatis Personae in print for two years or more: it's a story of masks and faces and genderbending, the ways we write and rewrite ourselves and the thresholds between worlds and hearts, and it's lovely. I know the mask that called it up and I am still amazed. As for Catherynne M. Valente's Oracles: A Pilgrimage, it's a cycle of Americana and arcana and the dark glitters of truth, and Mary Renault said it best: Here was the double-tongued, whose words move to their meaning like a serpent in a reed-bed, coil and countercoil . . . Go and marvel at their beautiful cover design. Buy. Read. You do want these.

Andre Norton is dead. I will not say that she is still one of my favorite authors, but my parents' house had all the old DAW paperbacks and I read them as a child, and I will always have a soft spot in my heart for The Jargoon Pard and Eet of The Zero Stone.

Geven a tsayt . . .

*Where did I learn of these, so handily close to home? In Ireland this summer, checking out a six-hundred-year-old fortified townhouse by the name of Taaffe's Castle—a tumbledown, slate-roofed ruin with ivy and small epiphytes rooted vertically on its walls, that was once waterfront property before Carlingford harbor was dredged to build up its docklands, with a nice little historical plaque out front yet and a touristy gift shop nearby. The world is too small.