Tag Archives: Geoff Lemon

Going Down Swinging Longbox

Posted on 2 Oct 2015 | 2 comments

Geoff Lemon, Katie Pase, Rhys Tate & Simon Cox (editors), Going Down Swinging Longbox (2015)

gdslbxFaced with the recurring heartache of literary-magazine editors, of having to reject excellent material because it exceeds the magazine’s word count, the Going Down Swinging crew had the bright idea of publishing a boxed set of such rejects. And here it is, a collection of five slim books (for a range of values of the word ‘book’) enclosed in a paper box. It’s a beautiful artefact – like Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library, but for grown-ups. The separate pieces are:

gdslb5Bridget Lutherborrow, Thirteen Story Horse (illustrated by Harley Manifold)

Thirteen short stories set in a block of flats, each story bearing the number of its characters’ flat. There’s a talking horse who makes furniture out of egg cartons, a girl called Henrietta who has a mysterious supply of eggs (and useful egg cartons), a woman who irritates her neighbours by calling her husband’s full name when they’re having noisy sex, another woman who grows big hairy man hands when she drinks too much, someone who talks almost entirely in cliches, and so on. The stories are full of apartment living’s tangential connections and mysterious glimpses into other lives, with added weirdness and the horse providing a through line. Lovely ink wash drawings add a lyrical dimension.

alt=Andrew Denton (with a little help from Megan Herbert and David Squires), Looking a Little Drawn

Who’d have thought Andrew Denton had a whole other career in him? Yet here he is, with 30 original cartoons, each printed on a separate card, all but three executed with the skill level of a bright five year old. The resulting combination of sharp wit and primitive technique is totally disarming. The three exceptions, which are executed by Megan Herbert and David Squires (to help him, Denton says in an author’s note, ‘realise some ideas that neither the left nor right side of my brain knew how to draw’), wouldn’t be out of place in, say, the New Yorker. For example, a giant, radiant, bearded figure in a white robe sits on a throne in a supermarket with a tiny human on his lap; an onlooker says to a companion, ‘See? He really is real.’ How good it would be if The Monthly and/or the Saturday Paper started publishing such single-frame cartoons just for fun. Not that Denton totally avoids topicality: I ventured to reproduce one in my blog post on David Marr’s quarterly essay on Bill Shorten.

Version 2Luke Johnson, Ringbark

Ringbark is an excerpt from Luke Johnson’s unpublished novel On Dead Highways. It’s an elegant 74-page book with a gorgeous cover drawing by Caroline Hunter, but I can’t tell you more than that because I have a policy of  not reading excerpts from novels in newspapers or magazines. I’ll wait for the whole thing.

Version 2Pat Grant, Toormina Video

A graphic novella–memoir in which Pat Grant tells the story of his alcoholic father. It’s pretty sordid, but it’s complex, and in the end respectful and full of love. The novella was first published on the internet two years ago, and you can still see that version at Pat Grant’s web site. Here, the 44 pages of the story are printed on 11 sheets of paper, each of which unfolds to reveal a single drawing and text on the other side, filling in details, responding to comments on the internet, meditating on art, addiction, family and other maters raised: the equivalent of DVD extras. I found it deeply satisfying, and I imagine that anyone who had a non-violent alcoholic parent would find it even more so.

Version 2Version 2Katherine Kruimink, News from a Radiant Future
Libbie Chellew, Protein
(both illustrated by Anthony Calvert)

Two dystopian novellas back to back. In Protein a city (country? world?) is under threat from a mysterious epidemic that shares some features of the zombie apocalypse. From a series of vignettes, we piece together a picture of what’s happening. Many questions are left unanswered, and the panic of the situation gets under the reader’s skin. At least it did mine. And then, the end, and we’re left with it.  Katherine Kruimink’s story is likewise a patchwork – memos from a noticeboard, dialogue, what may be a diary entry by someone who is in 21st century terms illiterate. We are in the middle of things again – a small community of human survivors live in a compound, survivors of an invasion by Them (who are left undescribed apart from passing mentions of tentacles and technological superiority). Is it safe to leave the compound as the younger generation believe? Will the heroic sacrifice of two of the older generation come to anything? Will the group survive to another generation? All is left unresolved, brilliantly.

The package was produced with the help of crowd funding. My copy arrived as a fabulous surprise long after I’d made my donation. But you don’t have to have been a member of the funding crowd to own a copy. You can buy it online.

aww-badge-2015Added later: Though they are part of a bigger bundle, Thirteen Story Horse and the Protein/News from a Radiant Future pair are the seventeenth and eighteenth books I’ve read for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Going Down Swinging 33

Posted on 4 Mar 2013 | Leave a comment

Going Down Swinging 33 (edited Geoff Lemon and Bhakthi Puvananthiran 2012)

20130222-211751.jpgGeoff Lemon, co-editor, was surely tempting fate and the critics when, as soon as the 32nd issue of GDS was complete, he nicknamed the impending No 33 the Jesus Issue. Wasn’t that like predicting the journal’s death, or at least inviting a crucifixion? Well, maybe, but after all it’s Going Down Swinging we’re talking about, whose title has been cheerfully proclaiming its imminent demise from the very start. Perhaps, then, the nickname was intimating that the physical object made of ink and dead trees was about to be resurrected, transformed into an incorporeal, wholly digital being. But no, though there is The Blue Corner online and a CD comes as part of the thing itself, the fabulous design of No 33, by Elise Santangelo and Stuart Hall, draws dramatic attention to its materiality, with tabs, die-cuts, a range of stocks, and clever use of showthrough – without, I say with heartfelt appreciation, detracting from legibility.

It looks as if the only actual consequence of the nickname was a number of Jesus-related submissions, enough of which made the cut to constitute a 38-page Jesus section. Like the rest of the magazine, these are predominantly hip inner-city Melbourne, the one surprise being ‘Out of the Kitchen Since 30 AD’, Elizabeth Redman’s straightforward personal essay reclaiming Christian faith from the reactionary fundamentalism and dubious institutional politics that tends to dominate public discussion of it.

Two other pieces stood out for me as admirably plain-speaking. André Dao’s ‘Out of Our Bodies’ is a memoir about Catholicism, atheism and mortality. He could have been describing a scene from Michael Haneke’s Amour in his final image of his grandparents singing together at his grandfather’s deathbed:

… My grandfather seemed finally to hear her, and then they were both singing, falling in and out of tune. For a moment they seemed lifted out of their slumped, brittle bodies, and their wrinkled faces were crumpled in concentration and remembered pleasure.

And Fiona Wright’s short poem ‘Consider the Camel’ feels as if it should always have been there, and manages to use the word ‘platyclades’ without missing a beat.

For the rest, there’s hardly a dud in the lot of them. ‘Atlas Dharma’, a commissioned by Cate Kennedy with watercolour illustrations by Simon MacEwan, recalls and recreates a childhood fascination with the Reader’s Digest atlas. Eric Yoshiaki Dando’s The Novel Teacher has fictional (I hope) fun with creative writing courses. Una Cruickshank gives us some memorable travel writing in ‘Varanasi’. I skipped an essay that begins with a quote from Lacan and a story that starts out, ‘Long, long ago, afore a-coming of the dust, the mani-lands were a-crowdening with mani-folk’, but that tells you more about me than them.

When I mentioned an inner-Melbourne sensibility, I wasn’t implying parochialism – quite the contrary, the feel is urbane, cosmopolitan. But I was struck by the way a number of pieces from oversea, and even interstate, stood out. You’d expect that of the stories from Russia and India (one each). It was contributions from the USA that prompted me, in the absence of an ‘About the Contributors’ section, to go Googling the authors – not because of a proofreaderish irritation at US spellings, though there was that, but because the voices were noticeably different in ways that are hard to specify – louder, more confident of their own centrality, something like that. When I think of the gigantic magazine that downloads to my RSS feeder, I’d guess that most of what I read there is from the US, and increasingly I live in a global culture. Here, where the proportion is roughly reversed, I’m surprised and reassured to feel a sense that local minds are engaging in locally inflected ways with issues that range from the intensely local to the cosmic.

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