Goblins

By Jen Calleja and Rachel Louise Hodgson

Goblins explores the beasts we've loved, hated, and longed to be. In a searing exploration of her personal obsessions and preoccupations—from disturbing 80s fantasy films and uncanny puppets in modern art, to sexual predators in music scenes and her longing to 'become a goblin' like her icons and fellow performers in DIY punk—Jen Calleja shows us the ways she has lived in relation to these base, hungry, selfish and carefree creatures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rough Trade Books
• Release date: Nov 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912722860

Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja is a poet, writer and essayist who has been widely published, including in The White Review, The London Magazine, and Best British Short Stories (Salt). She was awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors to work on Vehicle, and was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize for an excerpt from the novel. She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize as a literary translator from German into English and was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library. Jen is co-founding editor of Praspar Press and played and toured in the DIY punk bands Sauna Youth, Feature, Monotony, Gold Foil and Mind Jail.

Book preview

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

PROLOGUE: DEFINE GOBLIN

PART ONE:GOBLINHOOD

PART TWO:ART GOBLINS

PART THREE:GOBLINCORE

POSTSCRIPT: GOODBYE GOBLINS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

COPYRIGHT

PROLOGUE

DEFINE GOBLIN

For me, anything that behaves mischievously and in its own best interest, that is bold and all body, could be a goblin, though this does not necessarily mean they are evil or cruel. Above all, a goblin is shameless. A goblin has no shame. This is my personal history of goblinry.

PART ONE

GOBLINHOOD

GOBLIN MATINEE

A lot of people are scared of puppets. There’s something about their uncanniness that disturbs us. But I feel like I was brought up by them. I learned the alphabet from Sesame Street (I still say ‘zee’ and ‘haitch’). I thought the Psammead—the small, hairy, grumpy sand-fairy from the nineties programme Five Children and It (1991)—looked exactly like my grandad when he had his shirt off. All my favourite TV programmes and films as a kid born in ’86 had them in: soft, furry, fleshy, wet-looking, dead-eyed, blinking, toothy, gummy creatures that moved of their own volition. Even when I could see the strings or the wires, or surmised a hand out of shot, or couldn’t see them breathe, they still felt very real to me, these mischievous creatures that always had the potential to be either malicious or benign.

There was some contention around what was appropriate viewing for children back in the 80s, and much of what my parents let me watch was actually terrifying and arguably traumatised me and thousands of other kids. Whether or not this is actually the case, I feel like the stories and messages and morals that these films and programmes gave me, as I watched them over and over again until the video warped, became the foundation of my existence in part due to their puppet eeriness.

At the Kino Museum-Lichtspiele in Munich they have shown The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) every Friday and Saturday night since 1977. My fantasy forever-screening in a cinema would be the things I watched that have left the biggest impression on me, the big cult puppet fantasies: Labyrinth (1986) every Friday and as part of a Saturday matinee double bill with Return to Oz (1985). The Dark Crystal (1982) would show one Sunday a month, and before every screening there would be one of the fourteen episodes of The Storyteller (1987) instead of trailers. There’d also be books for sale where you get your popcorn and pick ‘n’ mix: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) and a dozen other books I would have specially selected.

I’ve been re-watching the above almost constantly over the last couple of years. Even now as a thirty-three-year old I find them comforting, and they still give me