Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty
by Sher Doruff
Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty is the first in a series of novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking. A storyline, or genealogy, tinted a shade of RGB blue, is fashioned by thinking through the felt unthought of this between space. A fabulation, an anarchive of what passes through. Lucid dreaming of this type is rife with allusions to conceptual and material goings-on, manifesting in awkward imaginaries. The dream personas are rendered as complex character amalgams with nomadic ages, sexes, genders and phenotypes. Occurrences of lived ‘fact’ elide with a hallucinatory real as speculation.
In A Novelty, Bette B, an ageing quasi-academic artist researcher, and BØB, attuned urban rodent, are palindromic variants of a generic cast of Betty’s and Bob’s. The happenstance of their meeting on the super slick POMOC affects a trans-special contagion. These are the fact of the matter. The matters that come to concern both B’s are more slippery and elusive.
Author Bio
Sher Doruff is an artist, writer and theorist. She supervises 3rd cycle and masters artist researchers at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy of Art and Design and the DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam. She is a member of several editorial boards including the Journal of Artistic Research.