last year at betty and bob’s a novelty Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press @ https://punctumbooks.com/support If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedi- cated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a wel- coming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) last year at betty and bob’s: a novelty. Copyright © 2018 by Sher Doruff. This work carries a Creative Commons by-nC-sa 4.0 Interna- tional license, which means that you are free to copy and redistrib- ute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First edition published in 2017 by Open Humanities Press. Second edition published in 2018 by 3Ecologies Books/Immediations, an imprint of punctum books. https://punctumbooks.com Isbn-13: 978-1-947447-79-0 (print) Isbn-13: 978-1-947447-80-6 (ePDF) lCCn: 2018953766 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei LAST YEAR AT BETTY AND BOB’S A Novelty Sher Doruff Contents Chapters Foreword * 15 * An Occurrence * Bette B * 27 * B B * 31 * They * 39 * Interview with ShazDada, Part One * 51 * Hello Purello * 61 * Knock Knock * 67 * Who’s There? * 71 * The Blue Ones * 77 * Real Hallucina- tion * 83 * Quasimodo * 89 * The Dark Precursor * 95 * A Rat’s Tale of Life in the Wrinkles * 101 * Soundings * 107 * Interview with ShazDada, Part Two * 111 * Blue Betty and Bob * 125 * Blue Marble * 127 * Forensic Clues * 131 * Bette B’s Tendencies * 135 * Blue Betty’s Monsters * 139 * Blue Bob’s Holes * 145 * Topologies * 149 * Bette B’s Affinities * 155 * Dust * 159 * Billy in the Box * 163 * Afterword * 165 Footnotes A Laryngeal Chronology * 49 * Zoomorphic * 65 * Quasi-modo * 93 Figures * 167 Every bit of blue is precocious. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons You say to the boy open your eyes When he opens his eyes and sees the light You make him cry out. Saying O Blue come forth O Blue arise O Blue ascend O Blue come in [...] Blue protects white from innocence Blue drags black with it Blue is darkness made visible Blue protects white from innocence Blue drags black with it Blue is darkness made visible Derek Jarman, Blue Acknowledgments Thanks to Karen Dunn and Lucy Cotter for their sharp, tenacious editing assistance. To Erin Manning and the Senselab for their enduring support, and to Andrew Sta- pleton for his help in preparing the manuscript. To all and every germ of idea and sensation spread by artists, thinkers, students, colleagues, friends, family, neighbors, media, and spam folded into the pages here. 15 Foreword Day 222 This is all so fucking tedious. Day 223 I requested a new journal today, oversized with unlined pages. The cute intern with snakey dreads delivered it within an hour, taking the trouble to buy one from an art supply store so the paper quality is heavier and better suited for ink, markers, and glue. One-hundred and eighty gsm. I figured the lack of struc- ture would free me from a linear left-to-right inclination. I feel like drawing and pasting feral collages with images from the net and my phone. They let me use the wifi printer at the reception desk. I’m sure it annoys the hell out of them. I can’t quit myself entirely from words just yet. Each passing day the responsibility to leave some kind of trace in my own hand confronts me. The shape of my thoughts surprises as they squirt from my pen. I try to write in my mother tongue, avoiding the inflections of this new language as much as possible. 16 Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty Day 224 I feel my capacity to embrace change will soon exhaust itself. I’m fast approaching the threshold of too much, though differentiat- ing my past from what I am becoming is no longer fraught with angst. Clock time is an abstraction. Sleep doesn’t save me from anything. A storm rages inside and outside the boundaries of my skin, my hair, my tongue. Oddly, what I most miss of my recent past is the Purello ritual. Doomed to a singular reality, weirdly surreal that it is, I have lost all sense of an exit, an escape hole. I sit here, encased in the discomfort of an antiseptic cork-lined room in the quarantine wing of an epidemiology clinic some- where mountainous. It looks like Zurich outside the porthole window. I try to imagine I’m Marcel Proust rather than a lab specimen but I can’t shake the residual image of Man Ray’s death photo of the guy. The “Team” have kindly brought in a few piec- es of my own furniture to upgrade the comfort factor but, to be honest, these objects only heighten my dis-ease. The fancy new treadmill is a non-replacement for walks in the park. I refuse to pursue the obvious analogy any further. Within the constrained cubic dimensions of this germ-free space I’m sprouting phobias. Claustrophobia, androphobia, cynophobia, the list is endless. Happily, my tendency towards neophobia is overwhelmed by the rapid rate of change itself. Change is the new stasis. I want to run wild and feel distance and proximity shift around me, watch objects grow from peas to planets in scale. I remain in position XYZ. Everything stays the same size while moving. Day 227 Daytime tv is a disaster. 17 Foreword Day 245 They prick me so often I’m covered with needle marks on every limb, the membrane of my very tough skin surface a moonscape of purples and blues. Though I’m in no pain whatsoever I get a daily hit of morphine, compensation I suppose for the absence of my preferred altering substance. Perhaps they wish to keep me in a suspended state of dependency? It’s a power play, for sure, “We must keep the beast at bay,” but I’m up for the game. What do they call it in American football? A Hail Mary pass? That’s their play. Anyway, I have to admit this drug has a pleas- ant kick and it’s about all I have to look forward to as the days go by aside from ruminating on the ever-so tiresome constant of transformation. Hopefully cathartic events documented in this journal will help deflect my meaner mood swings. We’re all counting on that. I think they’re secretly afraid to make me an- gry. They tiptoe very carefully around my dispositions which of course are perfectly visible on my cheek. Sometimes I flash a fiery blinking red which translates to “max threat” on their scale but it’s a “horniness alert” on mine. I haven’t told them the truth of it because I enjoy watching the fear level increase on their faces. It keeps my boredom at bay. 19 1 An Occurrence Once inside the enormous edifice dedicated to the last gasp of an anachronistic trade, she slipped. Here she was again in the PostOffice. The reflective surfaces in this curved glass and polished brass monument deflected any illusion of service. She thought the building had a mu- tant feel to it, the errant progeny of a science museum and a Trump hotel. She was well aware of the urban myth swelling from the aura of the long west wing of this structure. She ambled to the notorious sector on the fifth level in no rush. The rush was to come. For once there, where gilded public storage lockers marked a repetitive landscape of forgot-