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    Going Down Swinging: Essays, Letters, Reflections
    Going Down Swinging: Essays, Letters, Reflections
    Going Down Swinging: Essays, Letters, Reflections
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    Going Down Swinging: Essays, Letters, Reflections

    By Going Down Swinging

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    The best essays, travel stories and musings from the online history of Going Down Swinging, one of Australia’s longest-running and most respected literary journals. Supported by the University of Melbourne, Essays, Letters, Reflections features online favourites from Oliver Mol, Jenny Sinclair, Scott Wings, Sian Campbell and Z. P. Heller, as well as stories surrounding Going Down Swinging’s thirty-six year history by founders Kevin Brophy and Myron Lysenko. The ebook features the surreal line drawings of Genna Campton, paying homage to Going Down Swinging’s long and heady relationship with print.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGoing Down Swinging
    Release dateAug 30, 2015
    ISBN9780994367402
    Going Down Swinging: Essays, Letters, Reflections
    Author

    Going Down Swinging

    Going Down Swinging is one of Australia’s longest-running and most respected literary journals: publishing digital as well as print and audio anthologies since 1979 and producing sensational, sold-out live events.

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      Book preview

      Going Down Swinging - Going Down Swinging

      Cover_Image.jpg

      Going Down Swinging

      essays | letters | reflections

      Copyright

      Published in 2015 by Going Down Swinging Inc.

      © Copyright remains with the respective authors.

      Going Down Swinging

      PO Box 24, Clifton Hill, Victoria, Australia 3056

      www.goingdownswinging.org.au

      Edited by Megan Anderson

      Design and Production by Matt Short, mattshort.com.au

      Illustrations by Genna Campton

      Proofreading by Bridie Mills

      GDS Editors – Geoff Lemon, Katia Pase

      Associate Editors – Rhys Tate, Simon Cox

      Online Editor – Megan Anderson

      General Manager – Joanna Gould

      Typeset in Crimson Text by Sebastian Kosch

      Version 1.0

      ISBN 978-0-9943674-0-2

      Going Down Swinging is supported by the University of Melbourne’s Cultural and Community Relations Advisory Group (CCRAG) and School of Culture and Communications.

      University of Melbourne Logo

      Summary

      essays

      How Digital Culture is Making You Someone Slightly Different

      matthew harnett

      What books, bits and the internet is doing to our memory.

      •

      Going with Fergus

      z.p. heller

      Z. P. Heller follows the ghosts of Joyce and his father in Ireland.

      •

      Stealing from the Past

      jenny sinclair

      Imagining the life of Queen Victoria’s would-be assassin, Edward Oxford.

      •

      Finding the Words

      jessica friedmann

      Reflections on birth, language and the wavering word.

      •

      Desperate for Students

      susan k. burton

      Exam season in Japan.

      •

      The Tiny Spark of Here and Now

      kim sherwood

      Writing from Hungary's archives.

      •

      The (Public) Space Invaders

      tyne daile sumner

      Can sincerity exist in packed spaces?

      •

      The Ghosts a Biography Summons

      hannah garrard

      Sir Rider Haggard at Ditchingham House.

      •

      A Small Boy

      kevin brophy

      Don't be scared to be scared: confronting the fear of writing.

      •

      letters

      Two People Write Letters to Each Other About Things That Happen While They are Travelling in Different Countries Even Though, Sometimes, Not a Lot Actually Happens

      katia pase & oliver mol

      Epistolary tales across continents.

      •

      Voices from the Edinburgh Fringe

      scott wings

      Conversations overheard at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

      •

      Notes from the Desperate Capital of Somnopolis

      daniel east

      The insomnia of airports.

      •

      reflections

      In the Beginning

      kevin brophy

      The birth of Going Down Swinging.

      •

      The Formative Years

      myron lysenko

      Making lit mags and mistakes.

      •

      I Believe in Magic

      sian campbell

      Religion, magic and poetry.

      Editorial

      megan anderson

      the going down swinging website launched three years ago in an old underwear factory in Brunswick. As an intern stationed at the door, stamping wrist after wrist of readers and writers and sneaking swigs of ‘non-cleanskin’ wine with my fellow intern (now co-editor) Katia Pase, I felt a strange kind of mania. A ‘thank god I’ve found my people’ feeling. This is pretty significant when you’ve been carted around the world so often you feel and say nothing when people ask where you’re from.

      The GDS website, which opened at the helm of editor Meaghan Bell, was initially dubbed The Blue Corner to play on the boxing images conjured by the Going Down Swinging name. GDS was christened by founders Kevin Brophy and Myron Lysenko in 1979 as an act of defiance: the idea being that it’s better to go down fighting, even if the end is inevitable. Over thirty-five years later, the fight is still on.

      In the online world, it’s insistent. The amount of words in the digital sphere upsets me enormously. There are not enough lifetimes to read the good stuff, and it would probably take double those lifetimes to determine where that good stuff actually is. If you think about the content online – if you really let it slice you – you can feel absolutely nanoscopic.

      For me, the GDS website is a reliable bubble of that good stuff. What I think stands out is its commitment to that original Swinging philosophy: to defy the click bait, read-it-once-and-it’s-gone online touting. We seek writing that’s fresh, thoughtful, well-crafted, and, most importantly, is timeless. The website champions and develops new voices through the editorial process, while drawing on the rich community of past GDS contributors and editors.

      Essays, Letters, Reflections brings the best of these worlds together by showcasing some of our strongest online works, coupled with reflections on our history, in a format that pays tribute to the evolution of the digital medium. The surreal line drawings of Genna Campton give a nod towards Going Down Swinging’s long and heady relationship with print – made stronger by the release of Longbox this year, our most ambitious publication yet – in the convenience of your preferred digital device.

      The ‘Essays’ section of this book takes many of its pieces from our ‘Stories From the Ivory Tower’ series of online commissions, funded by the University of Melbourne, which called on academics, thinkers and students from around the world to present their ideas in creative, fresh and accessible ways. What’s interesting about these pieces is how each writer weaves personal narratives around their research, showcasing the motivations that drive their work in the first place.

      ‘Letters’ collects the epistolary stories written between friends Oliver Mol and Katia Pase from across continents, as well as voices from abroad by Daniel East and Scott Wings. All these works are especially haunting for their exposure of the loneliness of travelling and our desire for connection, which is a feeling amplified, I think, in the solo traveller.

      ‘Reflections’ grounds these works and the rapid evolution of Going Down Swinging in stories on its history by Kevin Brophy and Myron Lysenko, including their initial guiding principles for the publication, which each editor over the years has embraced and experimented with in their own way.

      Sian Campbell wraps up the collection with her powerful memoir piece ‘I Believe in Magic’, which reminds us why we do this thing: why we open our laptops after hours or in lunchtimes or before hours, or why we give up weekends to read thousands of submissions; or race around the city trying to find a printer to who can help promote a book launch.

      Throughout this anthology, there’s a common thread that brings these works together: an overwhelming urge to search for something, to find histories to see the world through, or just to find the right words.

      Finding the words for an editorial (especially a first editorial) has been, to be honest, exhausting. But having known the phenomenal mentorship of Geoff Lemon, Emily Hollosy, Emily Andersen, Alice Williams and the rest of the GDS staff, as well as growing alongside and continually being astonished by the talents of those who started out with me as interns, Katia Pase and Alexandra Macalister-Bills (who went on to lead the organisation through a period of great growth), makes me feel incredibly humbled and stupidly lucky.

      So, as I scribble this in my bathtub in the lead-up to a launch that symbolises, for me anyway, a celebration of the website since that first one at Irene Warehouse three years ago, I’m looking forward to being with my people, filling their glasses with wine and feeling that strange and flighty thing, connection.

      Essays

      ESSAYS

      How Digital Culture is Making You Someone Slightly Different

      matthew harnett

      when i was twenty-five, I began to suspect I wasn’t as smart as I’d been at twenty. It was a few tiny things. Where a couple of repetitions had once been enough to commit a phone number or some lines of text to memory, it now took a dozen, two dozen. I didn’t feel as sharp as I remembered being, as quick or fast to learn new things. I’d formerly spend hours at a time reading novels or studying, but now I couldn’t keep still for more than a few minutes. My mind wandered and I became trivially distracted, looped like an ancient scratched record, skimming the same paragraph over and over.

      I panicked. Maybe, I thought, I was drinking too much. Maybe I was depressed, or stuck in a rut, or otherwise rudderless. Possibly it was early onset dementia, or some godawful neuro-whatever disease. Maybe it was nothing except a potent mix of ageing and hypochondria, and this was just the beginning of a dimly terrifying descent into premature senescence.

      It could’ve been any of those things, but it was definitely something else as well. This slow muddling is happening to you, too, whether you notice it or not. The internet and digital culture weren’t conspiring to make me dumb – not exactly – but they were subtly changing the way I put together my thoughts, quietly tweaking the structure of my brain.

      Our brains haven’t changed much in the 40,000 years since we stopped living in caves. Anatomically, you can’t tell the difference between the brain of a modern and a prehistoric homo sapiens sapiens. Despite this, there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that any sort of culture has a profound impact on the physical structure of our most complex organ. The blank slate we’re born with is modified over time by our experiences. This has implications for our memory and the way we order our thoughts, our personalities, our very selves. Any change in our brain’s wiring affects the way we’re capable of thinking about things. Our hardware determines what software we’re running.

      Somehow, though, our software – our thoughts – can also make meaningful changes to our hardware. We become better at things when we practise them, as the disparate parts of our brain responsible for carrying out a given task slowly get used to working with one another. Neurons that fire together, the adage goes, wire together. One cultural practice in particular seems to significantly rewire our brains, to prime us for thoughts of a different quality and texture, to expand our innate capacities beyond imagining: reading.

      It’s strange, because although people are born to suck up language by hearing it spoken, there’s nothing in our evolution, according to French cognitive scientist Stanislas Dehaene, that "could have prepared us to absorb language through vision. Yet brain imaging demonstrates that the adult

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