Something For The Weekend: Wendy Erskine's Cultural Picks

In Dance Move, the new collection of short stories from Wendy Erskine, we meet characters who are looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by the moment in their past that marked them - read an extract here.

It's the second volume of stories from acclaimed Belfast-based author Erskine, following the acclaimed Sweet Home. She talks to RTÉ Arena below...

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We asked Wendy for her choice cultural picks...

FILM

Cow by Andrea Arnold is a documentary about a dairy cow called Luma. There's no voiceover, no dialogue beyond a few random snatches of conversation from farm workers or vets, no music beyond the occasional tinny sound of the radio in one of the barns. That means that your whole attention is focused on the visual dimension and the beautiful creature that is Luna. It wasn’t long before I was anthropomorphising this cow as emblematic of a woman visiting male gynaecologists or the individual in a capitalist system and so on and so on! It’s an uncompromising, brutal film.

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MUSIC

I am listening to the 2019 album Heartbreak, from Unloved. It’s fantastic.

BOOK

Pupa by poet J. O. Morgan is a novel published by Henningham Family Press. It’s about Sal and Megan, two larvae who exist in a world simultaneously similar and different to our own. Sal and Megan can remain at their juvenile stage or decide to move to a process of transformation. I found it really beguiling. It’s beautifully done. I’d say it’s about adulthood and friendship but I know that if I read it again, I would find it about something else entirely.

PLAY

One of my favourite ever performances is Karen Allen playing Laura in the film of The Glass Menagerie, directed by Paul Newman. (I love the fact that Karen Allen now runs a textiles shop called Karen Allen Fiber Arts). I would quite like to see London production of this that is coming to the Duke of York’s Theatre, with Amy Adams as Amanda Wingfield.

I have gone from being someone who spent day after day doing little other than watching TV to being a person who rarely watches anything. I like re-runs of Top of the Pops and getting nostalgic about everything I didn’t like at the time. It was amazing how wrapped up everyone was. You know, Chrissie Hynde onstage in leather trousers, a jumper, jacket and scarf.

GIG

The last gig I attended was the Sabrejets at the Amercan Bar in Belfast. They’re a Belfast rockabilly band and the singer Brian was in the punk band Rudi. Anyway, the Sabrejets were great. One of the songs they played sounded so like You Don’t Love Me by the Jamaican singer, Dawn Penn. When I looked it up I saw that Dawn Penn’s song had a Bo Diddley writing credit so it all made rockabilly sense!

An upcoming gig I am looking forward to is Mdou Moctar, the Tuareg guitarist who comes from Agadez, a desert village in rural Niger. I’m not an expert on Tuareg music but I find it transporting.

ART

When I first saw the art of Caroline Walker, it reminded me of the type of paintings that were used to illustrate the stories in the DC Thomson magazine, The People’s Friend. That’s not a criticism: it’s a little to do with the style but is more a measure of the infrequency that certain kinds of women are represented – those changing sheets on a bed, hoovering, putting something out in the bin. As soon as something is painted, it is changed and seen differently. Have a look at Caroline Walker’s pictures and you may well find you notice people you normally take for granted and do not see.

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RADIO

The best radio programme I have heard recently is This Cultural Life on BBC Radio 4 where the artist Maggi Hambling talks to John Wilson about her formative cultural experiences. She speaks candidly about her life, 60s New York, Rembrandt and art school. I have got to be honest, I find most artists and writers not amazingly interesting. I include myself in that. But Hambling is one of those opinionated, spirited, unquantifiable forces who actually has something to say.

TECH

Joanna Walsh comes up with ingenious projects. Seed is a story that you can access online that allows you to read it through different navigations by choosing different 'vines’. It’s captivating and beautifully done, with botanical illustrations by Charlotte Hicks. Another project of Joanna’s is an Artificial Intelligence called @MarkieviczMark1, trained on the prison letters of Constance Markievicz. Using a dataset of Irish women’s words, it generates text, oracle style, in response to your questions. You can find it here.

2) is it a good idea to build a forgiveness machine? pic.twitter.com/xEpd9xl9oA
— Markievicz_Mark_1 (@MarkieviczMark1) April 22, 2022

THE NEXT BIG THING...

We need to move away from Next Big Things.

Dance Move by Wendy Erskine is published by The Stinging Fly Press.

Something For The Weekend: Wendy Erskine's Cultural Picks

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