Goblinhood (eBook)

Jen Calleja (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
182 Seiten
Rough Trade Books (Verlag)
978-1-914236-46-4 (ISBN)

Infos

As formally inventive as readers have come to expect from one of the most daring writers around, and as wild and tricky as its subject matter requires, Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode  presents us with a series of essays and poems that playfully, artfully propound Jen Calleja's theory of 'goblinhood'--a theory that takes in all aspects of pop culture from film, tv, literature and art as well as the author's personal and original examinations of grief, lust, family histories and the physical fact of living in the world as it is. Goblinhood  is a perpetually and variously curious, visceral addition to Calleja's remarkable oeuvre.

Jen Calleja is the author of Vehicle: a verse novel (Prototype), named a Book of the Year in Granta and The Big Issue; the long poem Dust Sucker (Makina Books); and the forthcoming hybrid translator memoir Fair (Prototype). She was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize 2020 and longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experiment in Text 2020, and her writing has been published in The White Review, The London Magazine, Ambit, Wasafiri, Best British Short Stories (Salt), The Shining: A Visual and Cultural Haunting (Rough Trade Books), and elsewhere. She has been shortlisted for many translation prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize 2019 for her translation from German of Marion Poschmann's The Pine Islands. She is co-publisher at Praspar Press, which supports Maltese literature in English and English translation. She is from Shoreham-By-Sea and now based in Hastings.

Textauszug

GREEN

ON EMBLEMATIC EMERALD

 

As a rule, I always look for green objects in charity and antique shops. It’s a particular kind of green I have in mind, a kind of deep jade, or, if made of glass or plastic, emerald. It’s so I have one particular thing to search for among the junk rather than aimlessly browsing; it’s a microcosm of how I experience the whole world all at once and often need a key to navigate it. This game-for-one is inspired by the film Return to Oz, the 1985 non-musical and not-really-a-sequel sequel to The Wizard of Oz. In the film, the Nome King has turned the citizens of the Emerald City into stone, trapped Ozma—Princess of Oz—inside the mirror world, and transformed King Scarecrow into a green ornament, which the Nome King has hidden in his cavernous ornament room. Dorothy Gale and her friends the Gump, Jack Pumpkinhead and Tik-Tok the clockwork soldier travel to Nome Mountain to demand the Nome King return the emeralds he’s stolen from the Emerald City and de-stone the people of Oz. But they’re no match for him—he imprisons Dorothy and takes away her gang of adoring misfits, secretly greenifying them for his collection. The Nome King wants to play a game. He tells Dorothy she can walk around his hall of objects to find her friends, without her knowing that they are green. She must place her hands on the object she thinks might be a friend and shout, ‘OZ!’ If she’s right, they will transform back. She has three guesses, and each wrong guess makes the heavens roll with thunder. She picks a green object by chance, guesses correctly, and goes on to release many friends. King Scarecrow is a huge emerald, clearly someone precious. I have a memory of finding a piece of green sea glass with my grandad that was so perfect, a smooth green pebble like a big gemstone, but I can’t remember if it was real or if I dreamed it, or if I lost it and had dreams where I found it again. We had a set of Disney encyclopaedias growing up that a family friend had given us, and I was obsessed with a set of pages that displayed all the varieties of precious stones—pebble-sized and neatly lined up on the display case page. I think I loved some of them so much I scribbled over them, like when you use a coin on a scratch card in the hope of winning treasure.

After everyone is freed, the Nome King is brought down by Dorothy’s pet chicken Billina, who drops an egg into the King’s hollow eye socket—‘Don’t you know’ the Nome King booms sadly, ‘eggs are poison to gnomes.’ The claymation here is terrifying, the grown-huge King, who harnesses the power of the mountain rock, melts in fire, briefly holding onto himself in the form of a fracturing skull before his final collapse. (He looks like he’s been hit by the ‘malevolent green’ torpedo Todd McEwen mentions in his essay about seeing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a kid, rather than an egg—McEwen is also taken by the film’s monster squid: ‘just a big marionette’.)

‘Eggs kill the Nome King? I killed the Nome King!’ This is how Doug Aberle begins his charming homemade video about creating the clay animation for this and other sequences in Return to Oz, showing the four agonising attempts he needed to make the Nome King’s crumbling death work. Claymation really sets a film in a particular time, like any technological advancement in film does—puppets with visible strings, shonky CGI. Instagram comedian Claire Manning does a skit about a fictional 80s children’s film, a send-up of Labyrinth and possibly Return to Oz called Sewer Town complete with little songs where the main character’s parents are kidnapped by goblins and there’s ‘randomly claymation’.

The Nome King in Return to Oz abducted the citizens of the Emerald City, and the King of England stole the Green Man. In her essay “The Kidnap of the Green Man by the King”, poet and essayist Rebecca Tamás speaks of how ‘disturbed’ she felt to see the image of the Green Man (who we find everywhere here in Hastings, where we moved three years ago, and who looks like the Nome King) on the coronation invitation of King Charles and Queen Camilla. I admit I can only think of the Royal Family as Spitting Image puppets. My imaginary friend growing up was Lovejoy, the fictional antiques dealer, and when Spitting Image ended they gave the actor who played him, Ian McShane, his puppet doppelgänger: ‘I used to have it in a canvas chair in L.A.,’ McShane said in an interview, ‘with full-size leather jacket propped on top, like a work of art. Over the years, the puppet crumbled beneath it rather like a modern version of Dorian Gray.’ Tamás acknowledges that the inclusion of the Green Man is a nod to Charles’ self-image as an ‘eco-King’, but argues that it’s grossly inappropriate because the Green Man, with links to May Day and Robin Hood and the commons, is ‘a figure of folklore that is tricksy, rebellious and powerful’ and Charles and Camilla are massively wealthy landlords. Tamás ends her essay by placing a kind of curse on the King: ‘I hope that the Green Man’s kidnapped image will flicker out, freeing itself from the misguided invitations, escaping through the haze of bunting and confetti, to haunt the King and his coronation, and to haunt his reign beyond.’ Her bad spell continues: ‘I hope that its green leaf-ridden voice might echo in the thicket, the river, the hedge and the wood, to remind Charles that nothing lasts—that everything, however old, however powerful, will burn down to ash and fall away.’ Two of my favourite green men are Alistair Green and Anthony Green. Alistair Green (does he ever get called Ali G, I wonder, after the tracksuited demon?) is a comedian and actor who posts videos on Instagram of him playing cringeworthy characters such as moaners from middle England who could be a new version of Monty Python’s troglodyte Britons with hankies on their heads (did you know that Terry Jones wrote Labyrinth?), inept and posh social media influencers, and an array of desperate and unself-aware men. His general persona is a guy who’s a bit of a killjoy who talks to camera from his generic white flat and spends his weekends sending dispatches of himself being miserable in public and mocking local gentrification. One of his best creations is a spoof of what might be BrewDog (‘punks’ who rescinded the London Living Wage from their staff and tried to sue anyone that used the word punk in their branding) about a fictional microbrewery fronted by ‘Matt’ and ‘Matt’. One Matt used the profits from his buy-to-let properties to invest in the business, and the other Matt brings his experience as a senior creative at Saatchi & Saatchi (Goblin & Goblin). They reveal at the end that they sold the majority of the company to Budweiser (remember those frogs? Bud-weis-errrr) for a hundred million, and that Matt can only see his kids every other weekend. Every Halloween, Green reposts a video where he plays the ‘night goblin.’ A pale and inexplicably shirtless Green enters the bedroom of a man under the covers (also played by Green) threatening in song to tell a ghost story—it is time for your spoooooky story! it’s time, it’s time, it’s time!—with the Green man in bed ultimately submitting and the video ending before the story is told. He also recently posted a selfie with three horrific-looking abandoned dolls that are eerily reminiscent of the Tots from Tots TV with the caption:

Family isn’t just the best thing. It is EVERYTHING. Heck knows my little tribe (Jared 28, Chas 1, Teet also 1) can be trying at times but there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t thank the good lord for blessing me with these guys. Xxx #family #god #mykidsaremyworld #iddieformykids #andkill #love

Green had a small recurring part as a builder (odd odd-job man?) in the hidden-away ‘black comedy-drama sitcom’ Flowers, which I found by chance on Channel 4, maybe drawn in by Olivia Colman and Julian Barratt, a devilishly intriguing combo! Colman (the wicked stepmother in Fleabag, goblin queen in The Favourite, and goblin prey in Peep Show) and Barratt (the pretentious jazz toad Howard Moon in The Mighty Boosh and the pervy doll-loving cretin in Killing Eve) are Maurice and Deborah Flowers, a married couple on the brink of dissolution living in the middle of the British countryside with their adult twins.

Maurice Flowers is a depressed children’s book writer whose hit is a series of books about The Grubbs, a family of goblins. He is numb to everything including his family, missing his deadlines, distressed by his live-in mother’s dementia, and haunted by the disappearance of his stage magician father when he was a child. The Grubbs, we surmise, have been an outlet for him to explore his despair and sense of abandonment, and that they are clearly doppelgängers of his own family, until that is, he becomes so suicidal he finds he can no longer even write stories.

Tired of her husband hiding in his writing shed and exhausted by her deranged children, a sexually and maternally frustrated Deborah wants to smash up their whole grotto of domesticity, no longer able to wait for the day that the twins might leave the grubby nest. The twins,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.9.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Rough Trade Books
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: Cannibalism • Goblin • Goblinmode • Goblins • Grief • Jim Henson • Labyrinth • Literature • mischief • music • Pop culture • puppets • Sex • Shelley Duvall • TV
• ISBN-10: 1-914236-46-7 / 1914236467
• ISBN-13: 978-1-914236-46-4 / 9781914236464