PLUTO: NEVER FORGET

Pluto: Never Forget
(Book 2 of The Nines)
by Christian Peet

Interbirth Books, 2011
40 pages, 6″x8″
$25 (coptic) / $10 (pamphlet)
Limited Edition (SOLD OUT)

Designed by Micah Robbins and Clifton Riley, twenty-six books were bound between boards using the coptic stitch, lettered A-Z, and signed by the author; fifty books were bound in paper using the pamphlet stitch. The cover is an original silk screen print.

Pluto: Never Forget picks up where Book 1 of The Nines left off: before the election of Barack Obama was even a hope. Written for anyone stunned into mute horror during those dark days, Pluto: Never Forget offers an E-bay Monet, a drunk Brad Pitt and Mary Oliver, an “ordered variety” of phonemic systems grown from the “disorderly monotony” of “animal cries,” a graduating class of part-time highschoolers and full-time crackheads hoping to create a unified theory explaining everything in the universe, and cautionary tales of “conflicting imperatives such as Teach Peace and Eat the Rich.” Also included–at no extra cost–are images you won’t find on TV: “One for every dead Iraqi child–the boy popped by a tank, the girl whose eyes burned like marshmallows in her skull. Every East Coast gas station blanketed with their skin. Children enough to circle the US Capitol fifty times with a rope of small intestines. And so on.”

Peet’s scientific, linguistic, and cultural intertextuality continually branches out, inside, and around the book. The collection of stories requires the readers to engage themselves, follow trails, research, and enjoy….

— duncan b. barlow, author of Super Cell Anemia

Hailed by critics as “at least as fun as footnotes,” the nine movements of Pluto: Never Forget include mutations born of an Edge.org interview with mathematician and philosopher Reuben Hersh, as well as a variety of appropriated critical, scientific, and instructional texts including George F. Adams’ and Jerome Wykoff’s Landforms (A Golden Guide); Kenneth Clark’s Landscape Into Art; Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time; Eric N. Franklin’s and William H. Watkins’ Breakdance!; Anne Waldman’s and Marilyn Webb’s collection of lectures by visiting authors, Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute; and James Webb’s The Occult Establishment.

Excerpts from Pluto: Never Forget

[ 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 ]

"The graduating class is in for a world of hurt. Never mind that their beloved science-fair-models of our solar system will no longer include Pluto—each and every one of these kids, upon leaving this fabled institution, will need to reckon with their abysmal SAT scores..... Remember, hitting the rock between classes is one thing, being a full-time crackhead is quite another. You think you can just walk out those doors and go create your own unified theory explaining everything in the universe? Go on—good luck!"

[ 8 6 3 1 4 5 9 2 7 ]

Shift the unbeliever’s weight to their left buttock. Bend left leg behind and pull the unbeliever’s upper body forward, using nylon ropes or 2-inch link chains (wear gloves so as not to pinch or burn hands). Minimize “vomit hazard” by clearing unbeliever’s throat of any objects that may have been lodged there during capture or processing.

[ 4 7 1 8 5 2 3 6 9 ]

When Cleopatra determined that her apple had been both genetically modified and irradiated, she may have compared it to a summer’s day. Or she may have compared it to Uranus: holding the apple on its side, she may have noted how both the stem and the opposing, bark-like nub of the seed core are not unlike the abnormally tilted axis of said planet. She may have recalled, too, that at the time of Voyager 2’s passage, Uranus’ south pole was pointed almost directly at the sun, as if engaged in this egregious mix of metaphors as a show of disrespect: mooning, as it were, the sun.

[ 9 4 6 7 3 1 2 8 5 ]

Cleopatra had not planned to leave her post at the Higher Institute of Sciences and Technology of Mozambique. But, then, neither had she planned on Mozambique President Samora Moisés Machel’s plane crashing in the Lebombo Mountains. Nor could she ever have imagined that Machel would not number among the ten survivors. Certainly, she reasoned, no one among the survivors would have believed, that exactly eight weeks shy of the 20th anniversary of Machel’s death, the very solar system would be reduced to eight planets.

[ 3 5 7 9 1 8 6 4 2 ]

Van Gogh himself had admitted to finding few things more invigorating in art than a sense of mastery. Why then, wondered Mary Oliver, did she feel only doubt and a dull sense of déjà vu, as if she were repeating herself. Draining a bottle of Ravenswood merlot, she swatted her cat from the stack of mail and returned to her letter to her dear friend, Senator Hillary Clinton: “My robes, Hillary. Once a clear and accessible metaphor for wisdom, tonight my robes suggest only mothballs and Marlboro Reds. . . .”