Through the Labyrinth
The rest of the essay reads like a scaled-up version of this game. Shaken by the loss of her mother, by the coronavirus pandemic, and by ‘the constantly rising threat of climate crisis,’ Calleja attempts to negotiate the world itself by treating it like a giant charity shop and scouring it for ‘green objects’ – from King Charles’ appropriations of Green Man iconography to an avocado bathroom suite, from Marie NDiaye’s 2005 novella Autoportrait en vert to Kermit the Frog’s ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’. The initial attempt, however, appears to end in failure: ‘Green’ concludes with Calleja stopping before a shopfront in Hastings and lamenting, ‘Of the dozens of green objects in the window, not a single one was perfect. I continue to wait for a sign from the universe that I should return to the world’. Nevertheless, it goes on to provide Goblinhood with its modus operandi: over the five essays and seven poems which follow, Calleja proceeds to rifle through television, film, the internet, art, literature, and herself, not just for green things in general but for goblins and the goblinesque in particular. Here, the goblin isn’t simply Calleja’s subject but her thread through the maze, her guide to a world experienced ‘all at once’.
Oscar Mardell reviews Goblinhood by Jen Calleja.
My new neighbor may be related to me…
It was not my neighbor’s last name that first made me suspect he may be related to me. I fear you won’t believe me when I say that the moment I first suspected my neighbor and I might have a familial connection was when I saw him wearing a 49ers jacket. That is to say, as odd as it may sound, the first time I got the inkling of a suspicion I might have blood ties to my neighbor, was not when I noticed a similarity between our last names on a piece of mail, but when I saw my neighbor wearing a windbreaker displaying the red and gold iconography of the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League. I fear you might not believe me because the San Francisco 49ers are one of the top twenty most popular professional sports brands in the entire world, so belonging to this fan base is not exactly like belonging to some rare or exclusive club—not at all. On the contrary, my surname and my neighbor’s surname are extremely rare. So I’m afraid you might believe belonging to the San Francisco 49ers fan base (assuming my neighbor even belongs to this fan base) is an incredibly stupid thing on which to base the entire premise of a suspected familial relation, and that no person would take the time to write out such a basic, crackpot fantasy, and then put such a great deal of effort into sharing with others that article of writing born from this baseless hypothesis—this miserably stupid idea of mine—in the way I have put effort into sharing all this now. But I must insist that what I write is true…
A short story by Forrest Muelrath.