Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2018. 172 pages, illus. ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-7-90. DOI: 10.21983/P3.0233.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $21.00 in print: paperbound/5 X 8 in.

“A ‘rattling’ tale of transspecies slippage. In Last Year at Betty and Bob’s, worlds do not so much collide as slide into and under each other, forming a multiverse of body modulations and affective dissonances and attunements. Characters twin and twinnings double, in a parable of multiple becomings and becomings-multiple. Written with equal doses of wry wit and intensity of feeling, operating in a grey zone between theory and fiction, as well as between philosophy and science fiction, the book is in a genre of its own: truly a Novelty.”

~ Brian Massumi

Last Year at Betty and Bob's: A Novelty

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 (PostOffice MotionCorridor) affects a trans-special contagion. These are the facts of the matter. The matters that come to concern both B’s are more slippery and elusive.

Read the rest of the trilogy: Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Adventure (Vol. 2) + Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion (Vol. 3)

Read the second novella in the series, Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Adventure, HERE.

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