The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt.9: Holly Wade Matter

 

 

 

2024 Pleasures

by Holly Wade Matter

 

 

 

Something(s) old:      

Of late, I have been reacquainting myself with Pretenders II, an LP my college roommate owned but I did not. (As such, since it didn’t accompany me through the intervening decades, the record is tied to that specific time and place.) I remember being disappointed in it the first time I heard it. Several songs struck me as too soft. I wanted the tough Chrissie Hynde from the first album.

 Now, as I’m growing more familiar with the material, I am finding beauty in the soft songs: “Birds of Paradise,” “I Go to Sleep,” and especially the sorrowful “English Roses.” Yet the standout track for me is “Louie Louie” (no relation to the original), where Chrissie Hynde’s lyrics are at their best.

 

Courtesy of the Seattle Public Library and Kanopy, I have recently begun to reacquaint  myself with the BBC Shakespeare series from the late seventies/early eighties. The production values are low, as is the video quality, but some of the actors are top notch: Helen Mirren as Rosalind and Angharad Rees as Celia in As You Like It, Derek Jacobi brilliant as both Richard II and Hamlet, Felicity Kendal as Viola in Twelfth Night, and Cherie Lunghi and Robert Lindsay as the perfect bickering pair in Much Ado About Nothing. It’s always exciting to see how different actors interpret Shakespeare’s characters.

 

Something(s) new:

Speaking of Shakespeare, I recently read a lovely book called Shakespeare: the Man Who Pays the Rent. It’s a book of interviews between Brendan O’Hea and Judi Dench. Judi tells wonderful stories of playing various of Shakespeare’s women over the decades. The book is entertaining as hell and helped me consider Shakespeare’s women in a new light.

 

The past two years have been banner years for Nisi Shawl. Their fantasy, Speculation, came out in 2023. It’s a purely delightful tale of childhood, ghosts, and a magic pair of glasses.

 

Kinning takes over where Everfair ended, reuniting the reader with familiar characters, primarily Tink and his doctor sister, Bee-Lung. The siblings have a mission: to distribute Spirit Medicine - spores that generate deep empathy (kinning) - among couples and groups. There is derring-do, espionage, and an exceptional scene involving a stalled biplane.

 

Nisi’s most recent offering, The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox, consists of the journals of the main character – first as a child, later as a Beat poet, story writer, and children’s book author. Mardou, Black and a woman, learns how to navigate the mostly white and male Beat culture. At the same time, she explores her magical ability to slip back and forth “over the fence,” which she first experienced as a child.

 

Something borrowed and something blue:

While researching background for a novella, I checked out Songs of the British Music Hall from the Seattle Public Library

 Compiled by Peter Davison and published in 1971, this history of songs and the singers who popularized them is accompanied by sheet music. Some of the songs are suggestive, if not outright bawdy. Such songs were referred to by the artistes as “cerulean.” The book is an exciting glimpse into Music Hall and its culture and influence (which persists to this day in rock and roll).

 

 Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released in 2020 by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.