Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion
by Sher Doruff
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Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion is the third in a series of three novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking.
An Actual Occasion revisits the viral transitioning of the becoming rat-woman from Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty (vol. 1 in the trilogy). The adventure focuses on the Gritta’s, a gang of artists on retreat in the Dolomite Mountains, as they engage with the idiosyncratic, keeper of the keys, Roberta. Her other-worldly Café Arcadia, a magical cathedral of voluminous aphorism, is an archival refuge and durational homage to Benjaminian storytelling. This futurist fairy-tale is tinged with a curious mix of 19th-century feminist idioms and a queer, post-pandemic sanguinity.
Read the rest of the trilogy: Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty (Vol. 1) + Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Adventure (Vol. 2)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sher Doruff, PhD works in the visual, digital, and performance arts in a variety of capacities. For the past fourteen years her work has been situated in the expanded field of artistic research practice as an artist, writer, tutor, mentor, and supervisor. Her research practice currently explores fabulation and fictive approaches to writing in and through artistic research. She is currently head of the THIRD program at the DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam University of the Arts), mentoring and collaborating with 3rd cycle/PhD artist researchers. She has taught and supervised artists in many European schools and universities including the Gerrit Rietveld Academy of Art and Design. Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion completes her Betty and Bob trilogy, published by 3Ecologies/punctum books. She has also published numerous texts in academic and artistic contexts.
Genres: Fabulations, Posthumanism, Speculative Thought, TransQueer
Tags: animality, fabulation, Goethe, more-than-human, queer, speculative fiction, transindividual, Walter Benjamin.
