The Unseen Book Club Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:49:36 -0400 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1743875/website/background/edit en-us © 2026 The Unseen Book Club yes fdf216bf-5d0f-53b8-9436-6b29db29cd5c The Unseen Book Club episodic true Buzzsprout (https://www.buzzsprout.com) The Unseen Book Club https://storage.buzzsprout.com/x045vc5439wrpdxuv1fdjdagpz2b?.jpg The Unseen Book Club https://www.buzzsprout.com/1743875/website/background/edit The Death Ship by B Traven The Death Ship by B Traven The Death Ship was the first major novel by the legendary, anonymous anarchist novelist, B Traven (188? - 1969). Traven’s adventure novels of the ‘20s and ‘30s document proletarian struggle, as outcasts and downtrodden workers confront the absurdity and agonies of capitalist exploitation, borders, and statecraft. Most of his novels are set in Mexico, and are uniquely concerned with Mexico’s rural and indigenous proletariat.

The Death Ship stands out in Traven’s oeuvre primarily for its setting. It follows an American-borne sailor whose lost passport leaves him both jobless and stateless. Through landlocked European misadventures, he eventually finds work as a coal-drag on a broken-down steamship whose owners’ relentless drive for profits lead to the barest condition of life for the ship’s polyglot crew of luckless proles. Through his unnamed protagonist, Traven mocks the border regimes and bureaucracies, the petty caste systems that emerge amongst workers, and the innumerable insults of life as a forgotten debt-slave. He also searches, relentlessly, for connection, solidarity, and a contradictory affirmation of life through common struggle and shared labor.

We also discuss B Traven’s remarkable life.

Traven biography: B._Traven:_The_Life_Behind_the_Legends

Outro Music: Lord Creator - John B

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]]> The Death Ship was the first major novel by the legendary, anonymous anarchist novelist, B Traven (188? - 1969). Traven’s adventure novels of the ‘20s and ‘30s document proletarian struggle, as outcasts and downtrodden workers confront the absurdity and agonies of capitalist exploitation, borders, and statecraft. Most of his novels are set in Mexico, and are uniquely concerned with Mexico’s rural and indigenous proletariat.

The Death Ship stands out in Traven’s oeuvre primarily for its setting. It follows an American-borne sailor whose lost passport leaves him both jobless and stateless. Through landlocked European misadventures, he eventually finds work as a coal-drag on a broken-down steamship whose owners’ relentless drive for profits lead to the barest condition of life for the ship’s polyglot crew of luckless proles. Through his unnamed protagonist, Traven mocks the border regimes and bureaucracies, the petty caste systems that emerge amongst workers, and the innumerable insults of life as a forgotten debt-slave. He also searches, relentlessly, for connection, solidarity, and a contradictory affirmation of life through common struggle and shared labor.

We also discuss B Traven’s remarkable life.

Traven biography: B._Traven:_The_Life_Behind_the_Legends

Outro Music: Lord Creator - John B

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-18816611 Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0400 3210 34 full false Tuesday Or September Or The End by Hannah Black Tuesday Or September Or The End by Hannah Black Hannah Black’s superb novella Tuesday Or September Or The End (Capricious, 2022) is a science-fictionalized account of 2020 and its twinned world-making events of the pandemic and riot. The novella is caustic, hilarious, and written with both an unflinching eye for this world’s stifling and tragic conditions and a wide-open heart for its undoing and rebirth.

https://capriciousfoundation.org/publications/tuesday

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]]> Hannah Black’s superb novella Tuesday Or September Or The End (Capricious, 2022) is a science-fictionalized account of 2020 and its twinned world-making events of the pandemic and riot. The novella is caustic, hilarious, and written with both an unflinching eye for this world’s stifling and tragic conditions and a wide-open heart for its undoing and rebirth.

https://capriciousfoundation.org/publications/tuesday

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-18627695 Wed, 04 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500 2311 33 full false On and Off-Screen Imaginaries with Tiffany Sia On and Off-Screen Imaginaries with Tiffany Sia On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024) is a collection of six essays by filmaker, artist and writer Tiffany Sia. Sia joins us to discuss how media depictions of political practice and identity are produced, negotiated, memorialized, and transformed through censorship, surveillance, diaspora, and time. 

On and Off-Screen Imaginaries: https://primaryinformation.org/product/on-and-off-screen-imaginaries/

Tiffany Sia: https://www.tiffanysia.com/

HTHQ Workshop: https://hq.creativetime.org/calendar/sonic-literacy-with-tiffany-sia-and-jordan-lord/

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]]> On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024) is a collection of six essays by filmaker, artist and writer Tiffany Sia. Sia joins us to discuss how media depictions of political practice and identity are produced, negotiated, memorialized, and transformed through censorship, surveillance, diaspora, and time. 

On and Off-Screen Imaginaries: https://primaryinformation.org/product/on-and-off-screen-imaginaries/

Tiffany Sia: https://www.tiffanysia.com/

HTHQ Workshop: https://hq.creativetime.org/calendar/sonic-literacy-with-tiffany-sia-and-jordan-lord/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-18153153 Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:00:00 -0500 5296 32 full false Full Circle: A Life In Rebellion, by Ben Morea + 1000 Voices Collective, w/ Ariel Uesseler and Sabu Kohso Full Circle: A Life In Rebellion, by Ben Morea + 1000 Voices Collective, w/ Ariel Uesseler and Sabu Kohso Ben Morea is primarily known for his central involvement with the print magazine Black Mask and the militant anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. Both were active in New York City in the late 1960’s. In the 1970’s, Morea went underground and lived for forty years in the Southern Rockies, immersing himself in ceremonial practice with indigenous communities. In the 2010’s, he returned to New York City. Full Circle is an autobiographical account of his political, artistic, and spiritual life, edited from a series of interviews with 1000 Voices Collective.

We speak with Sabu Kohso and Ariel Uesseler about the process of creating Full Circle, and Morea’s fierce dedication to revolutionary living.

Full Circle: A Life In Rebellion

Our review of Full Circle will be appearing in print in the upcoming issue of Heatwave Magazine. Check out their first issue online.

Sabu Kohso’s writings and translation about the Japanese ultra-left can be found here and here.

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]]> Ben Morea is primarily known for his central involvement with the print magazine Black Mask and the militant anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. Both were active in New York City in the late 1960’s. In the 1970’s, Morea went underground and lived for forty years in the Southern Rockies, immersing himself in ceremonial practice with indigenous communities. In the 2010’s, he returned to New York City. Full Circle is an autobiographical account of his political, artistic, and spiritual life, edited from a series of interviews with 1000 Voices Collective.

We speak with Sabu Kohso and Ariel Uesseler about the process of creating Full Circle, and Morea’s fierce dedication to revolutionary living.

Full Circle: A Life In Rebellion

Our review of Full Circle will be appearing in print in the upcoming issue of Heatwave Magazine. Check out their first issue online.

Sabu Kohso’s writings and translation about the Japanese ultra-left can be found here and here.

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]]> Buzzsprout-17875121 Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:00:00 -0400 4891 31 full false RELAUNCH: The Unseen Book Club returns! RELAUNCH: The Unseen Book Club returns! The Unseen Book Club returns! Max and Dan do some light bibliomancy, reflect on the past and cast our gazes to the horizon and discuss the future of the show.


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]]> The Unseen Book Club returns! Max and Dan do some light bibliomancy, reflect on the past and cast our gazes to the horizon and discuss the future of the show.


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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-17875109 Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400 1017 30 full false Event Factory by Renee Gladman Event Factory by Renee Gladman Event Factory is the first in a cycle of novellas by Renee Gladman. An unnamed linguist-traveler arrives in the city-state of Ravicka, whose inhabitants speak a uniquely place-based, relational, and physically gestural language. The narrator is on a quest for meaning, understanding, and connection, but everything, even the buildings themselves, evade her.  Gladman is especially interested in language, architecture, and meaning; Event Factory echos Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Henri Lefabvre's work on the production of space. 

We are joined by two friends, Sirin Cucek and Auden Kotz, to explore the ever-shifting  semiotic and physical landscape of Ravicka. We talk about the violence of premises, ontologies of architecture, crises without conflict, the sensory allure of salsa dancers, and the explicitly political content in this enigmatic and abstract novella. 

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]]> Event Factory is the first in a cycle of novellas by Renee Gladman. An unnamed linguist-traveler arrives in the city-state of Ravicka, whose inhabitants speak a uniquely place-based, relational, and physically gestural language. The narrator is on a quest for meaning, understanding, and connection, but everything, even the buildings themselves, evade her.  Gladman is especially interested in language, architecture, and meaning; Event Factory echos Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Henri Lefabvre's work on the production of space. 

We are joined by two friends, Sirin Cucek and Auden Kotz, to explore the ever-shifting  semiotic and physical landscape of Ravicka. We talk about the violence of premises, ontologies of architecture, crises without conflict, the sensory allure of salsa dancers, and the explicitly political content in this enigmatic and abstract novella. 

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]]> Buzzsprout-14211115 Sat, 30 Dec 2023 16:00:00 -0500 4642 29 full false Publishing The Commune, w/ Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press Publishing The Commune, w/ Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press on discovering Marios Chakkas and finding a translator who would do justice to Chakkas’ unique voice.

Review of The Commune in Jacobin Magazine

Mikis Theodorakis' obituary in Monthly Review

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]]> Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press on discovering Marios Chakkas and finding a translator who would do justice to Chakkas’ unique voice.

Review of The Commune in Jacobin Magazine

Mikis Theodorakis' obituary in Monthly Review

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]]> Buzzsprout-13868858 Sun, 29 Oct 2023 20:00:00 -0400 1768 28 full false The Commune by Marios Chakkas, w/ translator Chloe Tsolakoglou The Commune by Marios Chakkas, w/ translator Chloe Tsolakoglou Marios Chakkas wrote The Commune in 1972 shortly before his death of cancer at the age of 41. Chakkas was a prolific Greek writer who lived through decades of hope, aspiration, repression and ultimately defeat for the country’s Left. A unique and unclassifiable novella, The Commune charts the state of Chakkas’ psyche through a dense sequence of memories, dreams, and imagined bureaucratic procedures. He reflects on his youth as communist militant during the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, the nature of the self, individual and relational, coming to a profound and contradictory understanding of political belonging and collective memory. Having discarded the trappings and failures of political parties and society at large, he seeks communion with his fellow outcasts in his imagined eponymous commune: barely described, only gestured at.

We speak with translator Chloe Tsolakoglou about 20th century Greek political history, theories of translation, texts that produce their own language of understanding, pathos and failure, and the ever-distant horizon of the commune.

Inpatient Press: https://www.inpatientpress.net/
Chloe Tsolakoglou: https://fridaycowgirl.com/

Unseen Book Club
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Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Marios Chakkas wrote The Commune in 1972 shortly before his death of cancer at the age of 41. Chakkas was a prolific Greek writer who lived through decades of hope, aspiration, repression and ultimately defeat for the country’s Left. A unique and unclassifiable novella, The Commune charts the state of Chakkas’ psyche through a dense sequence of memories, dreams, and imagined bureaucratic procedures. He reflects on his youth as communist militant during the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, the nature of the self, individual and relational, coming to a profound and contradictory understanding of political belonging and collective memory. Having discarded the trappings and failures of political parties and society at large, he seeks communion with his fellow outcasts in his imagined eponymous commune: barely described, only gestured at.

We speak with translator Chloe Tsolakoglou about 20th century Greek political history, theories of translation, texts that produce their own language of understanding, pathos and failure, and the ever-distant horizon of the commune.

Inpatient Press: https://www.inpatientpress.net/
Chloe Tsolakoglou: https://fridaycowgirl.com/

Unseen Book Club
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-13857509 Fri, 27 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400 5021 28 full false Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo author and prominent figure in the first of wave of the Native American Renaissance, spent ten year crafting Almanac of the Dead, published in 1991. Almanac is a sprawling, prophetic, epic novel populated by coke smugglers, arms dealers, sex workers, homeless veterans, scheming businessmen, corrupt politicians, and the people worldwide whose dreams are troubled by the fallout of the spiritual death of European descendants, or touched by the hope, however violent and tenuous, of the re-ascent of indigenous and African gods in the Americas. Much of Almanac takes place in Chiapas, Mexico, the plains of Colombia, or Los Angeles, but the story centers around Tuscon, Arizona and Lecha, a TV psychic who has given up her career and returned to the ranch of her smuggler sister Zeta, to transcribe the Almamanc of the Dead, a centuries old palimpsest of stories, memories and observations given to her by her Yaqui grandmother. Meanwhile, the colonial border societies of Arizona and Chiapas careen towards their reckoning with the disaffected and the dispossessed.

We are joined by friend and scholar E Ornelas to talk about non-linear time and ‘Native Slipstream,' the solidarity through the rejection or refusal of the racial order of colonial white supremacy, prophecy and political conjunctures, indigeneity and revolutionary politics, and are continuously astounded by Leslie Marmon Silko’s mastery of narrative craft.

Check out E’s band, E.T.
https://e-t-music.bandcamp.com/music

Music of Crepusculo Negro can be heard here:
https://crepusculonegro.bandcamp.com/

The lyrics accompanying the Vohlan/Blue Hummingbird on the Left split release are available on the Metal Archives
https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Volahn/Debajo_del_s%C3%ADmbolo_del_Sol 

Unseen Book Club
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo author and prominent figure in the first of wave of the Native American Renaissance, spent ten year crafting Almanac of the Dead, published in 1991. Almanac is a sprawling, prophetic, epic novel populated by coke smugglers, arms dealers, sex workers, homeless veterans, scheming businessmen, corrupt politicians, and the people worldwide whose dreams are troubled by the fallout of the spiritual death of European descendants, or touched by the hope, however violent and tenuous, of the re-ascent of indigenous and African gods in the Americas. Much of Almanac takes place in Chiapas, Mexico, the plains of Colombia, or Los Angeles, but the story centers around Tuscon, Arizona and Lecha, a TV psychic who has given up her career and returned to the ranch of her smuggler sister Zeta, to transcribe the Almamanc of the Dead, a centuries old palimpsest of stories, memories and observations given to her by her Yaqui grandmother. Meanwhile, the colonial border societies of Arizona and Chiapas careen towards their reckoning with the disaffected and the dispossessed.

We are joined by friend and scholar E Ornelas to talk about non-linear time and ‘Native Slipstream,' the solidarity through the rejection or refusal of the racial order of colonial white supremacy, prophecy and political conjunctures, indigeneity and revolutionary politics, and are continuously astounded by Leslie Marmon Silko’s mastery of narrative craft.

Check out E’s band, E.T.
https://e-t-music.bandcamp.com/music

Music of Crepusculo Negro can be heard here:
https://crepusculonegro.bandcamp.com/

The lyrics accompanying the Vohlan/Blue Hummingbird on the Left split release are available on the Metal Archives
https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Volahn/Debajo_del_s%C3%ADmbolo_del_Sol 

Unseen Book Club
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Buzzsprout-13528628 Mon, 04 Sep 2023 23:00:00 -0400 6029 27 full false Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, is a landmark work of social history first published in 1974. Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the lives, relationships, and theological worldview of everyday people in the small village of Montaillou in the Pyrenees mountains at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The narratives are sourced primarily from a document known as the the Fournier Register: a collection of interrogations of common people as the Inquisition sought to root out the last strongholds of a popular heretical tendency long referred to as ‘Catharism.’

We’re joined by friend and scholar Joe Albernaz to talk about the enduring legacy of the Cathars, heretical and weird cosmologies, the nature of history, interrogation as a narrative mode, and the origins of modernity.

 Joe’s writings can be found here.
He is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/albernaj

For more information about the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, check out:
This article by historian Elaine Graham-Leigh, and
This english translation of the Fournier Register

Unseen Book Club
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Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, is a landmark work of social history first published in 1974. Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the lives, relationships, and theological worldview of everyday people in the small village of Montaillou in the Pyrenees mountains at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The narratives are sourced primarily from a document known as the the Fournier Register: a collection of interrogations of common people as the Inquisition sought to root out the last strongholds of a popular heretical tendency long referred to as ‘Catharism.’

We’re joined by friend and scholar Joe Albernaz to talk about the enduring legacy of the Cathars, heretical and weird cosmologies, the nature of history, interrogation as a narrative mode, and the origins of modernity.

 Joe’s writings can be found here.
He is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/albernaj

For more information about the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, check out:
This article by historian Elaine Graham-Leigh, and
This english translation of the Fournier Register

Unseen Book Club
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-13284923 Tue, 25 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0400 5248 26 full false The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov Writer and translator Bela Shayevich joins the Unseen Book Club to talk about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov is primarily known in the West for his novel The Master and Margarita, but his most successful work in his lifetime was The Days of the Turbins, a wildly successful play about a family of White Guard officers in the besieged city of Kiev during the winter of 1918. The White Guard, first serialized in 1925, was the model for this work. Bulgakov was a doctor-turned-literary-bourgeois with reactionary sympathies who sought success from life and work in the Soviet Union. His work was praised by Stalin, yet by the 1930’s he was all but banned from publishing.

The White Guard is an incredible document of nostalgia, family, sacrifice, and the fraying social fabric of a beloved city. Russian intelligentsia, Ukrainian nationalists, peasants, Jews, Cossacks, Germans and at least one Bolshevik clash, scheme, betray and survive in the complex wartime politics of Kiev. We talk about the political chaos of the Civil War, artistic and aesthetic reaction, bourgeois nostalgia in a revolutionary society, and for the very first time on the Unseen Book Club, address ‘the Jewish question.’

Bela Shayevich:
https://www.belashayevich.com/
https://twitter.com/bela6_bela

Unseen Book Club:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Writer and translator Bela Shayevich joins the Unseen Book Club to talk about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov is primarily known in the West for his novel The Master and Margarita, but his most successful work in his lifetime was The Days of the Turbins, a wildly successful play about a family of White Guard officers in the besieged city of Kiev during the winter of 1918. The White Guard, first serialized in 1925, was the model for this work. Bulgakov was a doctor-turned-literary-bourgeois with reactionary sympathies who sought success from life and work in the Soviet Union. His work was praised by Stalin, yet by the 1930’s he was all but banned from publishing.

The White Guard is an incredible document of nostalgia, family, sacrifice, and the fraying social fabric of a beloved city. Russian intelligentsia, Ukrainian nationalists, peasants, Jews, Cossacks, Germans and at least one Bolshevik clash, scheme, betray and survive in the complex wartime politics of Kiev. We talk about the political chaos of the Civil War, artistic and aesthetic reaction, bourgeois nostalgia in a revolutionary society, and for the very first time on the Unseen Book Club, address ‘the Jewish question.’

Bela Shayevich:
https://www.belashayevich.com/
https://twitter.com/bela6_bela

Unseen Book Club:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-12864376 Tue, 16 May 2023 22:00:00 -0400 6815 25 full false The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier The Kingdom of this World, written by French-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949, is a cosmologically immersive novel of Haitian society and its ruptures during the Haitian Revolution. Carpentier sought to evoke the texture of 18th century Haiti through exploration of what he termed lo real maravilloso, or the marvelous real. Through the eyes of its central character Ti Noel, we encounter historical  figures like Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christoph, Pauline Bonaparte, and General Leclerc. However, Carpentier all but ignores the political dimensions of the revolution in favor of the social, the spiritual and ultimately, the liberatory.

We pair The Kingdom of this World with C.L.R. James’ historical masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. The reading is productive, in that both cast Black Haitians as historical protagonists in their liberatory struggle for emancipation; both attend to the dialectic of the Atlantic encounter, and both explore the tragedies and contradictions of Haitian independence. However, these texts are, in multiple dimensions, inverses of one another. 

We talk about vodou and the enlightenment, agency and structure, history and literature, and Carpentier’s excellent prose (masterfully translated into English by Harriet de Onís).

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/



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]]> The Kingdom of this World, written by French-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949, is a cosmologically immersive novel of Haitian society and its ruptures during the Haitian Revolution. Carpentier sought to evoke the texture of 18th century Haiti through exploration of what he termed lo real maravilloso, or the marvelous real. Through the eyes of its central character Ti Noel, we encounter historical  figures like Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christoph, Pauline Bonaparte, and General Leclerc. However, Carpentier all but ignores the political dimensions of the revolution in favor of the social, the spiritual and ultimately, the liberatory.

We pair The Kingdom of this World with C.L.R. James’ historical masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. The reading is productive, in that both cast Black Haitians as historical protagonists in their liberatory struggle for emancipation; both attend to the dialectic of the Atlantic encounter, and both explore the tragedies and contradictions of Haitian independence. However, these texts are, in multiple dimensions, inverses of one another. 

We talk about vodou and the enlightenment, agency and structure, history and literature, and Carpentier’s excellent prose (masterfully translated into English by Harriet de Onís).

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/



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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-12639784 Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:00:00 -0400 3549 24 full false Danton's Death by Georg Büchner Danton's Death by Georg Büchner Sasha Warren of the Unsound Mind blog returns to the Unseen Book Club to talk with about the life and work of revolutionary, proto-communist German playwright Georg Büchner (1813 - 1837). Büchner’s sparse writings were influential in the development of German modernist literature and socialism, mixing Hegelian materialism with biting satire and intimate psychological portrayals of political actors and working class characters.

We focus on his first play, Danton’s Death, about the famed trial and execution of Georges Danton during the French Revolution. We talk about Büchner’s revolutionary political work with the Young Germany movement and its contextual influence on Karl Marx, youthful angst and obsession, the French Revolution as a model of political struggles, and the madness of history.

Sasha Warren is on twitter and instagram

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/





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]]> Sasha Warren of the Unsound Mind blog returns to the Unseen Book Club to talk with about the life and work of revolutionary, proto-communist German playwright Georg Büchner (1813 - 1837). Büchner’s sparse writings were influential in the development of German modernist literature and socialism, mixing Hegelian materialism with biting satire and intimate psychological portrayals of political actors and working class characters.

We focus on his first play, Danton’s Death, about the famed trial and execution of Georges Danton during the French Revolution. We talk about Büchner’s revolutionary political work with the Young Germany movement and its contextual influence on Karl Marx, youthful angst and obsession, the French Revolution as a model of political struggles, and the madness of history.

Sasha Warren is on twitter and instagram

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/





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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-12457072 Thu, 16 Mar 2023 18:00:00 -0400 5698 23 full true El Apando by José Revueltas El Apando by José Revueltas José Revueltas, revolutionary communist and writer, wrote El Apando (The Hole) while incarcerated in the bowels of El Palacio de Lecumberri for his participation in the Mexico City student movement of 1968. It is a stark, gritty, and haunting prison novel that pits the petty violence and depravities of incarcerated addicts against the immobilizing horrors of prison as a social institution. Through feverish, claustrophobic, and compassionate prose, Revueltas posits the suffering of Mexico’s lumpenproletariat and the institutions that oppress them as an essential social and political question. We talk about gender, the fractal nature of prisons and social violence, tropes of prison narratives, and how fun it is to talk about a book for nearly as long as it takes to read it.

The Hole translated by Sophie Hughes and Amanda Hopkinson

El Apando (1976), dir. Felipe Cazals: link

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/



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]]> José Revueltas, revolutionary communist and writer, wrote El Apando (The Hole) while incarcerated in the bowels of El Palacio de Lecumberri for his participation in the Mexico City student movement of 1968. It is a stark, gritty, and haunting prison novel that pits the petty violence and depravities of incarcerated addicts against the immobilizing horrors of prison as a social institution. Through feverish, claustrophobic, and compassionate prose, Revueltas posits the suffering of Mexico’s lumpenproletariat and the institutions that oppress them as an essential social and political question. We talk about gender, the fractal nature of prisons and social violence, tropes of prison narratives, and how fun it is to talk about a book for nearly as long as it takes to read it.

The Hole translated by Sophie Hughes and Amanda Hopkinson

El Apando (1976), dir. Felipe Cazals: link

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/



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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-12228734 Fri, 10 Feb 2023 19:00:00 -0500 4525 22 full false Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest with Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corelle Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest with Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corelle Make the Golf a Public Sex Forest is an eponymously themed and self-published anthology of queer smut curated and edited by Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corelle. In summer 2021, an anonymous manifesto declared war on the Hiawatha Golf Course in Minneapolis, enrolling regional queer history to catalyze a reclamation of autonomous public spaces: Places to be used for encounter, exploration and eros. The stories, poems and essays in this anthology were written in response to the manifesto.

We talk to Jimmy and Lyn about the collection and how its many authors interpreted the call for submissions. The book is a constellation of steaming hot, down and dirty, genuinely freaky erotica, studies of sex in nature//nature as sex, critiques of the political horizons of sex, queer scene reports, and more. We talk about sexual utopias, transcending our own thresholds of desire, and the thrills of imagining our unknown pleasures.

Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest is available to purchase!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sex_forest

Theresa Sweetheart is on Bandcamp, Instagram, and many other platforms!

Jimmy Cooper is on Twitter, Instagram and elsewhere.
Lyn Corelle is on Twitter, Instagram, and their visual work is online.

Stewart Van Cleve’s Land of 10,000 Loves: A History Queer Minnesota is mentioned in the episode.

The Unseen Book Club:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/



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]]> Make the Golf a Public Sex Forest is an eponymously themed and self-published anthology of queer smut curated and edited by Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corelle. In summer 2021, an anonymous manifesto declared war on the Hiawatha Golf Course in Minneapolis, enrolling regional queer history to catalyze a reclamation of autonomous public spaces: Places to be used for encounter, exploration and eros. The stories, poems and essays in this anthology were written in response to the manifesto.

We talk to Jimmy and Lyn about the collection and how its many authors interpreted the call for submissions. The book is a constellation of steaming hot, down and dirty, genuinely freaky erotica, studies of sex in nature//nature as sex, critiques of the political horizons of sex, queer scene reports, and more. We talk about sexual utopias, transcending our own thresholds of desire, and the thrills of imagining our unknown pleasures.

Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest is available to purchase!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sex_forest

Theresa Sweetheart is on Bandcamp, Instagram, and many other platforms!

Jimmy Cooper is on Twitter, Instagram and elsewhere.
Lyn Corelle is on Twitter, Instagram, and their visual work is online.

Stewart Van Cleve’s Land of 10,000 Loves: A History Queer Minnesota is mentioned in the episode.

The Unseen Book Club:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/



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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-12058740 Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0500 5498 21 full true Mezzanine with Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian Mezzanine with Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian In a break from our usual format, we interview Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian of Inpatient Interactive about their video game Mezzanine, a MYST-style point-and-click puzzle game of techno terror and occult mystery. The game relies heavily on textual exploration. The plot emerges from pages of richly composed and frequently hilarious magazine articles, corporate documents, and emails. Mezzanine is a deeply researched and uncannily present invocation of the not-so-lost era of the pre-2000’s multimedia tech boom, and its ideological soup of neo-liberal counterculture psychedelia, libertarian capitalism, and deep state surveillance.

We talk about the occult methodologies used to create Mezzanine and their resonance with Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, fictional and historical narrative in immersive game environments, the construction of our contemporary digital subjectivities through conspiracy, and so, so much more.

Inpatient Press:

Mezzanine is free to play via Inpatient Press,  and on Steam.
Instagram: https://instagram.com/inpatient_press

Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest: https://maitlandsystems.bigcartel.com/

Unseen Book Club Podcast:

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Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> In a break from our usual format, we interview Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian of Inpatient Interactive about their video game Mezzanine, a MYST-style point-and-click puzzle game of techno terror and occult mystery. The game relies heavily on textual exploration. The plot emerges from pages of richly composed and frequently hilarious magazine articles, corporate documents, and emails. Mezzanine is a deeply researched and uncannily present invocation of the not-so-lost era of the pre-2000’s multimedia tech boom, and its ideological soup of neo-liberal counterculture psychedelia, libertarian capitalism, and deep state surveillance.

We talk about the occult methodologies used to create Mezzanine and their resonance with Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, fictional and historical narrative in immersive game environments, the construction of our contemporary digital subjectivities through conspiracy, and so, so much more.

Inpatient Press:

Mezzanine is free to play via Inpatient Press,  and on Steam.
Instagram: https://instagram.com/inpatient_press

Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest: https://maitlandsystems.bigcartel.com/

Unseen Book Club Podcast:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Buzzsprout-11954997 Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0500 5667 20 full true The Tricking Hour and My Pleasure by Irene Silt The Tricking Hour and My Pleasure by Irene Silt We talk to poet and writer Irene Silt about their two new books published by Deluge Books in October 2022. The essays in The Tricking Hour (2018-2019) and the poems in My Pleasure (2019-2021) are expansive, and broadly concerned with sex work, anti-work feeling, and the cultivation of capacity through intimacy and experience. They contain profound insights on the nature and feelings of work derived from the particularities of sex work.

We talk about affinities within and between subject positions, the politics that emerge from criminalized labor, collective and anonymous composition, boundaries and their essential permeability, intimacy, sexuality and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and how hard it is to remember your literary influences. We barely talk about queerness, love, or Sade.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> We talk to poet and writer Irene Silt about their two new books published by Deluge Books in October 2022. The essays in The Tricking Hour (2018-2019) and the poems in My Pleasure (2019-2021) are expansive, and broadly concerned with sex work, anti-work feeling, and the cultivation of capacity through intimacy and experience. They contain profound insights on the nature and feelings of work derived from the particularities of sex work.

We talk about affinities within and between subject positions, the politics that emerge from criminalized labor, collective and anonymous composition, boundaries and their essential permeability, intimacy, sexuality and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and how hard it is to remember your literary influences. We barely talk about queerness, love, or Sade.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Buzzsprout-11840729 Thu, 08 Dec 2022 22:00:00 -0500 4413 19 full true Episode 18.1 Translating Marx’s Capital into Spanish Episode 18.1 Translating Marx’s Capital into Spanish In episode 18, we talked about Raquel Salas Rivera’s use of key lines from Marx’s Capital in Lo Terciario/The Tertiary. Later, Max did some research and wrote more about the Spanish translation/critical edition of Capital that Salas Rivera quotes (and re-translates) in his poems, a collaborative work by Pedro Scarón and Siglo XXI Editores Argentina in the 1970s. Here, Max reads his short essay about that effort and translation in general as a political intervention in Latin American communism of the 1960s and 70s. 


Download the essay here. 

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]]> In episode 18, we talked about Raquel Salas Rivera’s use of key lines from Marx’s Capital in Lo Terciario/The Tertiary. Later, Max did some research and wrote more about the Spanish translation/critical edition of Capital that Salas Rivera quotes (and re-translates) in his poems, a collaborative work by Pedro Scarón and Siglo XXI Editores Argentina in the 1970s. Here, Max reads his short essay about that effort and translation in general as a political intervention in Latin American communism of the 1960s and 70s. 


Download the essay here. 

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-11726310 Sat, 19 Nov 2022 10:00:00 -0500 673 18 bonus false Lo Terciario/The Tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera Lo Terciario/The Tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera Lo Terciario/The Tertiary, a book of auto-translated poems by Raquel Salas Rivera (based in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia), interrogates the intimacies of familial bonds, gender, and colonization through a unique deployment of key concepts from Marx. “Formal” exposition of Marxian conceptions of debt, circulation, and the value form entangle moments of autobiographical detail within the history of anti-colonial struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and the context of the United States’ colonial response to Puerto Rico’s “national debt crisis.”

It’s a conceptually dense hook, but the poems are lucid, rich and intimate. We expose our status as deeply amateur Marxologists, talk about how poetry is a perfect medium for theoretical exposition, and raise unanswerable questions about the politics of translation.

Raquel Salas Rivera

Max wrote a *great* article about Pedro Scarón 1976 translation of Capital, which we speak about in the episode. Download it here.

DisemPOWERed: Puerto Rico’s Perfect Storm (2019) is an excellent documentary about Puerto Rican political economy, debt, and austerity.

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]]> Lo Terciario/The Tertiary, a book of auto-translated poems by Raquel Salas Rivera (based in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia), interrogates the intimacies of familial bonds, gender, and colonization through a unique deployment of key concepts from Marx. “Formal” exposition of Marxian conceptions of debt, circulation, and the value form entangle moments of autobiographical detail within the history of anti-colonial struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and the context of the United States’ colonial response to Puerto Rico’s “national debt crisis.”

It’s a conceptually dense hook, but the poems are lucid, rich and intimate. We expose our status as deeply amateur Marxologists, talk about how poetry is a perfect medium for theoretical exposition, and raise unanswerable questions about the politics of translation.

Raquel Salas Rivera

Max wrote a *great* article about Pedro Scarón 1976 translation of Capital, which we speak about in the episode. Download it here.

DisemPOWERed: Puerto Rico’s Perfect Storm (2019) is an excellent documentary about Puerto Rican political economy, debt, and austerity.

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-11568813 Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0400 3310 18 full true Minneapolis Book Event Recap Minneapolis Book Event Recap The Unseen Book Club recaps  the Minneapolis Everything for Everyone reading event from back in August, for which Dan and Sasha facilitated a tabletop role-play inspired activity. We talk about game design, collective imagination, and the suburbs.

Sasha’s madness blog  can be found here.



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]]> The Unseen Book Club recaps  the Minneapolis Everything for Everyone reading event from back in August, for which Dan and Sasha facilitated a tabletop role-play inspired activity. We talk about game design, collective imagination, and the suburbs.

Sasha’s madness blog  can be found here.



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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-11503274 Fri, 14 Oct 2022 21:00:00 -0400 1412 bonus true Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 with authors M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 with authors M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, co-authored by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien, is a series of fictional interviews with future revolutionaries. Through tumultuous decades of ecological, economic and political crises, people worldwide discover and build the commune form. Everything for Everyone is at once a cartography of revolution, a work of imaginative science fiction, and a hard look at what it might truly mean to envision the end of the current social order. When regimes of the nation state, markets, family and gender have fractured, the forces of counter-revolution are unable to coalesce, and people have nowhere to turn but to each other, what emerges is worth striving for.

We interview Eman and M.E. about the use of utopian imagination, writing about the future, the oral history form, trauma, healing and mass consciousness, the roles of culture and ideology, and collective power in crisis.

M.E. O’Brien is on Twitter @genderhorizon.
We reference the 2019 article in PInko Magazine, ‘Communizing Care’ in the episode.
NYC Trans Oral History Project: https://nyctransoralhistory.org/.
Eman Abdelhadi is on Twitter as @emanabdelhadi and instagram as @eabdelhadi.

Everything for Everyone is published by Common Notions.

Guest music by Hidden Benjamin:  Soundcloud and Bandcamp.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, co-authored by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien, is a series of fictional interviews with future revolutionaries. Through tumultuous decades of ecological, economic and political crises, people worldwide discover and build the commune form. Everything for Everyone is at once a cartography of revolution, a work of imaginative science fiction, and a hard look at what it might truly mean to envision the end of the current social order. When regimes of the nation state, markets, family and gender have fractured, the forces of counter-revolution are unable to coalesce, and people have nowhere to turn but to each other, what emerges is worth striving for.

We interview Eman and M.E. about the use of utopian imagination, writing about the future, the oral history form, trauma, healing and mass consciousness, the roles of culture and ideology, and collective power in crisis.

M.E. O’Brien is on Twitter @genderhorizon.
We reference the 2019 article in PInko Magazine, ‘Communizing Care’ in the episode.
NYC Trans Oral History Project: https://nyctransoralhistory.org/.
Eman Abdelhadi is on Twitter as @emanabdelhadi and instagram as @eabdelhadi.

Everything for Everyone is published by Common Notions.

Guest music by Hidden Benjamin:  Soundcloud and Bandcamp.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Buzzsprout-11059180 Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0400 5567 17 full true Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño In which Max and Dan tackle a work by Roberto Bolaño, one of the truly great novelists of the late 20th century. Nazi Literature in the Americas, originally published in 1996 and translated to English in 2008, is a biographical encyclopedia: a ficitonal canon of pan-American right-wing avant-garde writers. Despite the simple premise, ‘Nazi Literature’ is typical Bolaño: layered, enigmatic, and richly textured with historical and literary references.

We find ourselves returning to the same questions: Why did Bolaño write this book? Why conjure this cabinet of literary monsters? What can be said about history through fiction that cannot be explored through other means? We talk, (or avoid talking about) genealogies of fascism, freaks of Futurism, the political right in the Americas, and the fascination our political enemies' creative, expressive endeavors sometimes provokes in us.

The Hispanic Community of Nations: the Spanish-Argentine nexus and the imagining of a Hispanic Cold War bloc, Daniel Gunnar Kressel (2015)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
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]]> In which Max and Dan tackle a work by Roberto Bolaño, one of the truly great novelists of the late 20th century. Nazi Literature in the Americas, originally published in 1996 and translated to English in 2008, is a biographical encyclopedia: a ficitonal canon of pan-American right-wing avant-garde writers. Despite the simple premise, ‘Nazi Literature’ is typical Bolaño: layered, enigmatic, and richly textured with historical and literary references.

We find ourselves returning to the same questions: Why did Bolaño write this book? Why conjure this cabinet of literary monsters? What can be said about history through fiction that cannot be explored through other means? We talk, (or avoid talking about) genealogies of fascism, freaks of Futurism, the political right in the Americas, and the fascination our political enemies' creative, expressive endeavors sometimes provokes in us.

The Hispanic Community of Nations: the Spanish-Argentine nexus and the imagining of a Hispanic Cold War bloc, Daniel Gunnar Kressel (2015)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-11003282 Wed, 20 Jul 2022 23:00:00 -0400 4013 16 full true Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany In 1976, one year after the publication of his masterpiece Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany wrote Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. A prescient, layered and vexing novel, Triton traces the existential crises of gender, sex, alienation and desire plaguing its protagonist Bron Helstrom as he navigates daily life as a white-collar tech worker living in a gender-specified housing cooperative on Neptune´s moon Triton. A story of unrequited desire and petty social complaints unfolds amidst exquisite science-fictional word-building and the rich meta-textual study Delany is known for.

We are joined by artist and fellow Delany enthusiast Lyn Corelle. Although the book´s meaning is evasive, we have an amazing time discussing utopias and their discontents, political economy and war, the futurity of individualism and gender, and Delany´s peculiar interrogation of the political through relational tension.

Samuel R. Delany: ´To Read the Dispossessed´ (1976)
On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany (1990)
Joanna Russ: ´Recent Feminist Utopias´ (1981)
Michel Foucault: On Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias

Lyn Correlle can be found at:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/lyncorelle
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sex_forest

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> In 1976, one year after the publication of his masterpiece Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany wrote Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. A prescient, layered and vexing novel, Triton traces the existential crises of gender, sex, alienation and desire plaguing its protagonist Bron Helstrom as he navigates daily life as a white-collar tech worker living in a gender-specified housing cooperative on Neptune´s moon Triton. A story of unrequited desire and petty social complaints unfolds amidst exquisite science-fictional word-building and the rich meta-textual study Delany is known for.

We are joined by artist and fellow Delany enthusiast Lyn Corelle. Although the book´s meaning is evasive, we have an amazing time discussing utopias and their discontents, political economy and war, the futurity of individualism and gender, and Delany´s peculiar interrogation of the political through relational tension.

Samuel R. Delany: ´To Read the Dispossessed´ (1976)
On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany (1990)
Joanna Russ: ´Recent Feminist Utopias´ (1981)
Michel Foucault: On Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias

Lyn Correlle can be found at:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/lyncorelle
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sex_forest

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-10781860 Sun, 12 Jun 2022 23:00:00 -0400 5483 15 full true Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan Sitt Marie Rose, by Lebanese-American poet-painter Etal Adnan (1925-2021?), is a searing, vibrant statement on the paradoxes of a society erupting into violence. Published in 1978, it is an intimate depiction of the earliest days of the Lebanese Civil War through the lens of one (or two) young, female narrators as active witnesses. Violence and love clash across lines of class, sectarian and religious identity, political solidarities, nationalism and gender.

We are joined by poet and friend, Nora Treatbaby. We attempt to anchor our discussion in a rough-cut survey of the conflict, and are quickly thwarted by its complexity. Nora challenges us on collapsing the vibrancy of the poetic into mere contextual or historical readings. We discuss the psychology of fascism, the politics of language, and the possibilities of love against the tragedy of history.

Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation, by Fadi A. Bardawil: https://www.dukeupress.edu/revolution-and-disenchantment

Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP): https://merip.org/2021/10/capturing-the-complexity-of-lebanons-civil-war-and-its-legacies/

Beirut: War Generation (1989) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-15KBICWiQ

Nora Treatbaby´s first full-length publication Our Air is forthcoming through Nightboat Press https://nightboat.org/nightboat-poetry-prize-winners/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
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]]> Sitt Marie Rose, by Lebanese-American poet-painter Etal Adnan (1925-2021?), is a searing, vibrant statement on the paradoxes of a society erupting into violence. Published in 1978, it is an intimate depiction of the earliest days of the Lebanese Civil War through the lens of one (or two) young, female narrators as active witnesses. Violence and love clash across lines of class, sectarian and religious identity, political solidarities, nationalism and gender.

We are joined by poet and friend, Nora Treatbaby. We attempt to anchor our discussion in a rough-cut survey of the conflict, and are quickly thwarted by its complexity. Nora challenges us on collapsing the vibrancy of the poetic into mere contextual or historical readings. We discuss the psychology of fascism, the politics of language, and the possibilities of love against the tragedy of history.

Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation, by Fadi A. Bardawil: https://www.dukeupress.edu/revolution-and-disenchantment

Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP): https://merip.org/2021/10/capturing-the-complexity-of-lebanons-civil-war-and-its-legacies/

Beirut: War Generation (1989) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-15KBICWiQ

Nora Treatbaby´s first full-length publication Our Air is forthcoming through Nightboat Press https://nightboat.org/nightboat-poetry-prize-winners/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/
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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-10630310 Mon, 16 May 2022 22:00:00 -0400 4037 14 full true Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge Victor Serge (1890-1947), Belgian-Russian revolutionary, novelist, intellectual, political prisoner, and stalwart comrade to countless others, wrote his memoirs towards the end of his life while living stateless in Mexico. An insurrectionary anarchist in his youth, he joined the Bolshevik party in the early years of the Russian revolution. He was a steadfast defender of party democracy and freedom of intellect until his expulsion, and remained in the Soviet Union through imprisonment and exile until his deportation to Europe and ultimately to Mexico.

Memoirs is a stunning and immersive first-hand account of the contradictions and hopes of the revolutionary times he witnessed. Despite the relentless hardship, tragedy he and his fellows endured, Memoirs is deeply compassionate, intellectually rigorous and at times, spiritually resonant. He reflects on the decadent and stagnant conditions of pre-WWI Europe; the hungry yet hope-filled first years of the Russian Revolution, and the creeping horror of totalitarian party leadership. Above all, Serge is unsparingly passionate and generous in his portraiture of his revolutionary compatriots--both his friends and his enemies. 

We discuss the weirdly contemporary feel of anarchist subculture of Brussels in the 1910s, the enduring spirit of solidarity, and the consciousness that emerges from a lifetime of shared struggle.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> Victor Serge (1890-1947), Belgian-Russian revolutionary, novelist, intellectual, political prisoner, and stalwart comrade to countless others, wrote his memoirs towards the end of his life while living stateless in Mexico. An insurrectionary anarchist in his youth, he joined the Bolshevik party in the early years of the Russian revolution. He was a steadfast defender of party democracy and freedom of intellect until his expulsion, and remained in the Soviet Union through imprisonment and exile until his deportation to Europe and ultimately to Mexico.

Memoirs is a stunning and immersive first-hand account of the contradictions and hopes of the revolutionary times he witnessed. Despite the relentless hardship, tragedy he and his fellows endured, Memoirs is deeply compassionate, intellectually rigorous and at times, spiritually resonant. He reflects on the decadent and stagnant conditions of pre-WWI Europe; the hungry yet hope-filled first years of the Russian Revolution, and the creeping horror of totalitarian party leadership. Above all, Serge is unsparingly passionate and generous in his portraiture of his revolutionary compatriots--both his friends and his enemies. 

We discuss the weirdly contemporary feel of anarchist subculture of Brussels in the 1910s, the enduring spirit of solidarity, and the consciousness that emerges from a lifetime of shared struggle.

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-10413955 Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:00:00 -0400 4259 13 full true Reflections on Mumbo Jumbo Reflections on Mumbo Jumbo A short supplement to our main episode on Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. We talk about essays in Greg Tate's 'Flyboy in the Buttermilk.'

Music by James Blood Ulmer

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]]> A short supplement to our main episode on Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. We talk about essays in Greg Tate's 'Flyboy in the Buttermilk.'

Music by James Blood Ulmer

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-10249894 Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0400 1022 bonus false Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed Mumbo Jumbo is a “Neo-Hoodoo” detective story, a post-modern satire, a touchstone of Afro-futurist fiction, and an invocation of the artistic and spiritual rebelliousness of Harlem, New Orleans, and Haiti in the 1920s into the time of its writing in 1972. In its account of the nefarious attempts of the centuries-old white, Western conspiratorial orders seeking to stamp out a literally infectious dance craze spread by ragtime and jazz, Ishmael Reed satirizes the spiritual vacuity of monotheistic European civilization and attacks recuperative forces in the world of art and criticism. 

We read Mumbo Jumbo in dialogue with Cedric J. Robinson’s classic work, Black Marxism, which turned out to be a particularly useful parallel reading. In Black Marxism, Robinson traces the current world system to its roots in medieval Europe and proposes the Black radical tradition as a legacy of resistance that is ontologically opposed to racial capitalism. 

Intro, outro, and interstitial music excerpted from two records by the musical project Conjure: 'Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed' (1984) and 'Bad Teeth' (2005).

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]]> Mumbo Jumbo is a “Neo-Hoodoo” detective story, a post-modern satire, a touchstone of Afro-futurist fiction, and an invocation of the artistic and spiritual rebelliousness of Harlem, New Orleans, and Haiti in the 1920s into the time of its writing in 1972. In its account of the nefarious attempts of the centuries-old white, Western conspiratorial orders seeking to stamp out a literally infectious dance craze spread by ragtime and jazz, Ishmael Reed satirizes the spiritual vacuity of monotheistic European civilization and attacks recuperative forces in the world of art and criticism. 

We read Mumbo Jumbo in dialogue with Cedric J. Robinson’s classic work, Black Marxism, which turned out to be a particularly useful parallel reading. In Black Marxism, Robinson traces the current world system to its roots in medieval Europe and proposes the Black radical tradition as a legacy of resistance that is ontologically opposed to racial capitalism. 

Intro, outro, and interstitial music excerpted from two records by the musical project Conjure: 'Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed' (1984) and 'Bad Teeth' (2005).

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> Buzzsprout-10249455 Mon, 14 Mar 2022 17:00:00 -0400 3481 12 full true Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts IV-V Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts IV-V We return to Les Miserables after completing the second half of the book, which depicts the Paris Uprising of 1832 against the constitutional July Monarchy. Spoiler alert: The uprising ends in tragic defeat, but romance and hope prevail.

Hugo’s fiery radical liberalism echoes the dreams and ambitions of his antecedent revolutionary generation, which, by the middle of his life, were already being contested by new revolutionary ideologies of class revolution. As a bridge between these eras, Les Miserables retains its potency as a vibrant account of social rupture and the insuppressible human spirit. We talk about it all.

NOTE: This episode was recorded in spring 2021, so there are a couple of references that are about a year out-of-date. Please excuse the poor audio quality of this episode as an artifact of our relative inexperience at the time of recording.

The Unseen Book Club: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> We return to Les Miserables after completing the second half of the book, which depicts the Paris Uprising of 1832 against the constitutional July Monarchy. Spoiler alert: The uprising ends in tragic defeat, but romance and hope prevail.

Hugo’s fiery radical liberalism echoes the dreams and ambitions of his antecedent revolutionary generation, which, by the middle of his life, were already being contested by new revolutionary ideologies of class revolution. As a bridge between these eras, Les Miserables retains its potency as a vibrant account of social rupture and the insuppressible human spirit. We talk about it all.

NOTE: This episode was recorded in spring 2021, so there are a couple of references that are about a year out-of-date. Please excuse the poor audio quality of this episode as an artifact of our relative inexperience at the time of recording.

The Unseen Book Club: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-10085896 Wed, 16 Feb 2022 08:00:00 -0500 4303 11 full true Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts I-III Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts I-III Les Miserables, one of the great literary works of the nineteenth century, was written by novelist, poet, statesman, and overall man of affairs, Victor Hugo, in 1862. It’s a tale of romance and revolution, freedom and imprisonment, city and country, and the dialectical ferment of a society desperate to be reborn. Although widely thought to depict the French Revolution (1789-1792), it was actually written about the lesser known Paris Uprising of 1832, which Hugo lived through as a young man.

In this first episode of our two-part series on Les Miserables, we discuss the life and times of Victor Hugo, the composition and transformation of French class society, and how come we both kept falling for the same predictable plot twists involving some of Western literature’s most iconic characters. 

**NOTE: This episode was recorded in spring 2021, so there are references that are about a year out-of-date. Also, we ran into some regrettable audio issues partway through the episode.

The Unseen Book Club: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> Les Miserables, one of the great literary works of the nineteenth century, was written by novelist, poet, statesman, and overall man of affairs, Victor Hugo, in 1862. It’s a tale of romance and revolution, freedom and imprisonment, city and country, and the dialectical ferment of a society desperate to be reborn. Although widely thought to depict the French Revolution (1789-1792), it was actually written about the lesser known Paris Uprising of 1832, which Hugo lived through as a young man.

In this first episode of our two-part series on Les Miserables, we discuss the life and times of Victor Hugo, the composition and transformation of French class society, and how come we both kept falling for the same predictable plot twists involving some of Western literature’s most iconic characters. 

**NOTE: This episode was recorded in spring 2021, so there are references that are about a year out-of-date. Also, we ran into some regrettable audio issues partway through the episode.

The Unseen Book Club: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-9994677 Tue, 01 Feb 2022 17:00:00 -0500 4622 10 full true Post-exoticism in 10 Lessons: Lesson 11, by Antoine Volodine Post-exoticism in 10 Lessons: Lesson 11, by Antoine Volodine Post-exoticism in 10 lessons is a sweltering, dreamlike study of narrative under conditions of extreme surveillance. Translated into English in 2015 (Open Letter), the book is a part of pseudonymous French writer Antoine Volodine’s larger meta-fictional project.  His characters are incarcerated writers, former militants who develop ‘post-exoticism’ to communicate with each other using new subjective forms as the world liberation movements of the 60’s and 70’s are crushed and superseded by the neo-liberal world order. The book is itself a document of the unique literary modes of post-exoticism as its practitioners die off one by one, determined to be forgotten and remembered on their own terms.

This is a very special episode, in which Max and Dan are joined by a dear friend and comrade, Anita Negrini. We talk about languages of evasion, the resonant anti-politics of extreme genre-forms like grindcore, and the liberatory(?) chorus of the (un)remembered dead.

Music of avant-grind militants Cokskar can be found at:

https://cokskar.bandcamp.com/

The beautifully printed theory/review zine, Grind DIalectics Vol. I and II, can be acquired via cokskar@gmail.com

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]]> Post-exoticism in 10 lessons is a sweltering, dreamlike study of narrative under conditions of extreme surveillance. Translated into English in 2015 (Open Letter), the book is a part of pseudonymous French writer Antoine Volodine’s larger meta-fictional project.  His characters are incarcerated writers, former militants who develop ‘post-exoticism’ to communicate with each other using new subjective forms as the world liberation movements of the 60’s and 70’s are crushed and superseded by the neo-liberal world order. The book is itself a document of the unique literary modes of post-exoticism as its practitioners die off one by one, determined to be forgotten and remembered on their own terms.

This is a very special episode, in which Max and Dan are joined by a dear friend and comrade, Anita Negrini. We talk about languages of evasion, the resonant anti-politics of extreme genre-forms like grindcore, and the liberatory(?) chorus of the (un)remembered dead.

Music of avant-grind militants Cokskar can be found at:

https://cokskar.bandcamp.com/

The beautifully printed theory/review zine, Grind DIalectics Vol. I and II, can be acquired via cokskar@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-9878424 Wed, 12 Jan 2022 21:00:00 -0500 4088 9 full true His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal His Name Was Death is a 1947 science fiction novel published by Rafael Bernal, a Mexican writer, scholar, diplomat and activist in the Catholic reaction against the Mexican Revolution as part of the National Synarchist Union (UNS). It was translated from Spanish to English by poet and translator Kit Schluter, and published in October, 2021 (New Directions). Bernal is well-known in Mexico for his satirical crime-noir novel The Mongolian Conspiracy, but his work is wide-ranging, and largely unavailable in English. His Name Was Death is a bizarre and hilarious critique of modernist angst. It can be summarized as one man’s alcohol- and alienation-fueled quest to facilitate the domination of humanity by our rightful overlords, the mosquitos. 

We talk to translator Kit Schluter about despicable narrators, the biographical significance of an author, layered symbolism, sci-fi genre conventions, narratives of modernity through Catholic nationalism, and translating questionable content into the 21st century.

A recent article by journalist Max Pearl about the life of author Rafael Bernal, which emphasizes his political engagement with the UNS:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/lord-of-the-flies-pearl

A playlist of Synarchist ballads:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcF0hJ3Z8RQ&t=1988s

Kit Schluter: http://twitter.com/dedreytnien

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]]> His Name Was Death is a 1947 science fiction novel published by Rafael Bernal, a Mexican writer, scholar, diplomat and activist in the Catholic reaction against the Mexican Revolution as part of the National Synarchist Union (UNS). It was translated from Spanish to English by poet and translator Kit Schluter, and published in October, 2021 (New Directions). Bernal is well-known in Mexico for his satirical crime-noir novel The Mongolian Conspiracy, but his work is wide-ranging, and largely unavailable in English. His Name Was Death is a bizarre and hilarious critique of modernist angst. It can be summarized as one man’s alcohol- and alienation-fueled quest to facilitate the domination of humanity by our rightful overlords, the mosquitos. 

We talk to translator Kit Schluter about despicable narrators, the biographical significance of an author, layered symbolism, sci-fi genre conventions, narratives of modernity through Catholic nationalism, and translating questionable content into the 21st century.

A recent article by journalist Max Pearl about the life of author Rafael Bernal, which emphasizes his political engagement with the UNS:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/lord-of-the-flies-pearl

A playlist of Synarchist ballads:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcF0hJ3Z8RQ&t=1988s

Kit Schluter: http://twitter.com/dedreytnien

The Unseen Book Club: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-9714359 Mon, 13 Dec 2021 16:00:00 -0500 5354 8 full true Too Salty Too Wet by Tiffany Sia Too Salty Too Wet by Tiffany Sia The Hong Kong protests of 2019-2020 were a geopolitical, ideological, and media discourse flashpoint. We talked to artist and filmmaker TIffany Sia about her book Too Salty Too Wet, which also defies simple categorization. In the author’s words, it is “a hellish scroll,” using elements of memoir, family history, post-colonial theory, geopolitics, and the ephemera of digital communication to document the heat, claustrophobia, and embodied intimacy of street protests, police repression and international media attention. The book presents a tangible sense of ‘what it was like to be there,’ without a constraining interpretation of ‘what it was.’ 

In our conversation with Sia, we talk about the embodiment and presence of history, how conditions of labor determine the contours of resistance, the international circuitry of tactics, and untranslatability.  Questions half-asked and barely answered include: Was it a liberatory movement for democratic rights against police-state violence and authoritarian governance? Was it liberal-bourgeois reaction, reflecting capitalist-imperialist interest in restricting Chinese sovereignty? What was the class composition of the protests, and how did it contrast to previous moments of unrest in the territory? What is decolonization? How can asking these questions help us approach international solidarity?

Tiffany Sia

https://www.tiffanysia.com

https://twitter.com/t1ffany4scale

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/GSwT4bceeCRdGY6c9
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/5J3G1p4nSJGyZmZa9
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/HCoeV8ZJTMMTcfbY9

Too Salty Too Wet

https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/57273

Articles and discourses on HK

https://lausan.hk/

https://chuangcn.org/2020/05/remolding-hong-kong/

https://chuangcn.org/2020/06/frontlines/

The Unseen Book Club

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]]> The Hong Kong protests of 2019-2020 were a geopolitical, ideological, and media discourse flashpoint. We talked to artist and filmmaker TIffany Sia about her book Too Salty Too Wet, which also defies simple categorization. In the author’s words, it is “a hellish scroll,” using elements of memoir, family history, post-colonial theory, geopolitics, and the ephemera of digital communication to document the heat, claustrophobia, and embodied intimacy of street protests, police repression and international media attention. The book presents a tangible sense of ‘what it was like to be there,’ without a constraining interpretation of ‘what it was.’ 

In our conversation with Sia, we talk about the embodiment and presence of history, how conditions of labor determine the contours of resistance, the international circuitry of tactics, and untranslatability.  Questions half-asked and barely answered include: Was it a liberatory movement for democratic rights against police-state violence and authoritarian governance? Was it liberal-bourgeois reaction, reflecting capitalist-imperialist interest in restricting Chinese sovereignty? What was the class composition of the protests, and how did it contrast to previous moments of unrest in the territory? What is decolonization? How can asking these questions help us approach international solidarity?

Tiffany Sia

https://www.tiffanysia.com

https://twitter.com/t1ffany4scale

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/GSwT4bceeCRdGY6c9
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/5J3G1p4nSJGyZmZa9
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/HCoeV8ZJTMMTcfbY9

Too Salty Too Wet

https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/57273

Articles and discourses on HK

https://lausan.hk/

https://chuangcn.org/2020/05/remolding-hong-kong/

https://chuangcn.org/2020/06/frontlines/

The Unseen Book Club

 https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast/

Art by Eli Liebman

https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> Buzzsprout-9596240 Mon, 22 Nov 2021 21:00:00 -0500 6939 7 full true Industrial Park by Patrícia Galvão Industrial Park by Patrícia Galvão Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) published Industrial Park in 1933 at the age of 21. It was translated into English by Elizabeth and K. David Jackson in 1993. This modernist proletarian novel is at once an intimate window into the emotional lives of working class women in the industrial district of São Paulo, a biting satire of the social and sexual mores of the Brazil’s decadent bourgeoisie, and an eyewitness account of the fiercely militant labor politics of 1920’s Brazil.

We discuss tragedy as a mode of history, Pagu’s incredible biography and her navigation of her roles as a party militant and experimental, bohemian artist, the tensions between anarchist and communist methods of revolutionary labor politics, the complicated relation between desire and revolutionary politics, and how cool it is that people used to gas each other with ether at Carnival and why we should really bring that back.

Eternamente Pagu (1987): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFylqrCYB_U
A glamorized biopic about Pagu's early years. It's in Portuguese, so we didn't watch it, but it looks fun/interesting/maybe kinda bad but in a sort of sexy way.

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]]> Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) published Industrial Park in 1933 at the age of 21. It was translated into English by Elizabeth and K. David Jackson in 1993. This modernist proletarian novel is at once an intimate window into the emotional lives of working class women in the industrial district of São Paulo, a biting satire of the social and sexual mores of the Brazil’s decadent bourgeoisie, and an eyewitness account of the fiercely militant labor politics of 1920’s Brazil.

We discuss tragedy as a mode of history, Pagu’s incredible biography and her navigation of her roles as a party militant and experimental, bohemian artist, the tensions between anarchist and communist methods of revolutionary labor politics, the complicated relation between desire and revolutionary politics, and how cool it is that people used to gas each other with ether at Carnival and why we should really bring that back.

Eternamente Pagu (1987): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFylqrCYB_U
A glamorized biopic about Pagu's early years. It's in Portuguese, so we didn't watch it, but it looks fun/interesting/maybe kinda bad but in a sort of sexy way.

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-9458855 Fri, 29 Oct 2021 23:00:00 -0400 3995 6 full false Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif This first novel in Abdelrahman Munif’s masterful quintet depicts sweeping social and economic transformations in the Arabian peninsula during the development of oil reserves for global export. Written in Paris and first published in Arabic in 1984, Cities of Salt follows members of a Bedouin village somewhere near the Persian Gulf as local elites invite American companies to prospect for oil. Their lives and relationships undergo continuous ruptures as they must adapt to the new world being built around them.

We talk about Munif’s political origins in the Baath party, the Lovecraftian horrors of oil, the inseparability of culture and political economy, the sorrow and pain of losing collective identity, and the process of forming new social consciousness in a site of capitalist extraction.

Notes and References:

Sabry Hafez: ‘An Arabian Master,'
New Left Review 37
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii37/articles/sabry-hafez-an-arabian-master

Writing a Tool for Change: Abd al-Rahman Munif Remembered
MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, Spring 2007
https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/177979

Aramco: Era of Discovery (1984) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHh6wY2ua08
Odd orientalist propaganda documentary describing the earliest days of oil prospecting and development that led the formation of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO)

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]]> This first novel in Abdelrahman Munif’s masterful quintet depicts sweeping social and economic transformations in the Arabian peninsula during the development of oil reserves for global export. Written in Paris and first published in Arabic in 1984, Cities of Salt follows members of a Bedouin village somewhere near the Persian Gulf as local elites invite American companies to prospect for oil. Their lives and relationships undergo continuous ruptures as they must adapt to the new world being built around them.

We talk about Munif’s political origins in the Baath party, the Lovecraftian horrors of oil, the inseparability of culture and political economy, the sorrow and pain of losing collective identity, and the process of forming new social consciousness in a site of capitalist extraction.

Notes and References:

Sabry Hafez: ‘An Arabian Master,'
New Left Review 37
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii37/articles/sabry-hafez-an-arabian-master

Writing a Tool for Change: Abd al-Rahman Munif Remembered
MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, Spring 2007
https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/177979

Aramco: Era of Discovery (1984) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHh6wY2ua08
Odd orientalist propaganda documentary describing the earliest days of oil prospecting and development that led the formation of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO)

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-9289514 Thu, 30 Sep 2021 17:00:00 -0400 5182 5 full true The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Arundhati Roy’s second novel, written after she spent twenty years producing journalism and political essays. We discuss Ministry alongside her 2019 essay collection, My Seditious Heart, much of which ended up in the novel in one form or another. The result is a sweeping, unapologetically political narrative that follows lives, grudges, and romances across the breadth of modern India. Along the way, Roy charts the violence of capitalism and empire and the growth of a far-right that serves them both.

Recorded in January of 2021.

Literal Vultures // The interplay between neoliberalism and ethnonationalism // fame // betraying art // an architectural approach to narrative // the BJP and pogroms in India // The denatured politics of protest // the graveyard as a site of hope // The Kashmiri and Maoist insurgencies // the psychology of counterinsurgency and empire

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]]> The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Arundhati Roy’s second novel, written after she spent twenty years producing journalism and political essays. We discuss Ministry alongside her 2019 essay collection, My Seditious Heart, much of which ended up in the novel in one form or another. The result is a sweeping, unapologetically political narrative that follows lives, grudges, and romances across the breadth of modern India. Along the way, Roy charts the violence of capitalism and empire and the growth of a far-right that serves them both.

Recorded in January of 2021.

Literal Vultures // The interplay between neoliberalism and ethnonationalism // fame // betraying art // an architectural approach to narrative // the BJP and pogroms in India // The denatured politics of protest // the graveyard as a site of hope // The Kashmiri and Maoist insurgencies // the psychology of counterinsurgency and empire

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-8849337 Mon, 12 Jul 2021 07:00:00 -0400 3789 4 full true Memory of Fire, Vols. II and III by Eduardo Galeano Memory of Fire, Vols. II and III by Eduardo Galeano Memory of Fire, a trilogy written by Eduardo Galeano between 1981-86 while in exile from his native Uruguay, traces the history of the Americas from the earliest periods of European contact through conquest, colonization, independence, revolutions, imperialism and globalization. Composed of short, fictionalized vignettes depicting historical figures at iconic moments, scenes of daily life, class conflict and encounters with the natural world, Memory of Fire recasts history as a collective, human process unfolding in cyclical, mythic time. While it emphasizes the agency and experiences of women, indigenous, the enslaved and the exploited, it is unflinching in its depiction of the brutal and compromised humanity of the powerful.

We’re joined again by Andres Black to discuss volume II, Faces and Masks, and III, Century of the Wind.

The accumulation of power and royal decadence // the double-edged blade of science // From liberal to class revolution // the dawn of U.S. imperialism // the United States is not a country // The Guatemalan coup and the moral flattening of the world // the complicity of the media // modernity, magic, villainy, nuance // history is not over

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Interstitial music by La Guacharaca: https://jzaratech.wixsite.com/elvalledelbrujo/la-musica

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]]> Memory of Fire, a trilogy written by Eduardo Galeano between 1981-86 while in exile from his native Uruguay, traces the history of the Americas from the earliest periods of European contact through conquest, colonization, independence, revolutions, imperialism and globalization. Composed of short, fictionalized vignettes depicting historical figures at iconic moments, scenes of daily life, class conflict and encounters with the natural world, Memory of Fire recasts history as a collective, human process unfolding in cyclical, mythic time. While it emphasizes the agency and experiences of women, indigenous, the enslaved and the exploited, it is unflinching in its depiction of the brutal and compromised humanity of the powerful.

We’re joined again by Andres Black to discuss volume II, Faces and Masks, and III, Century of the Wind.

The accumulation of power and royal decadence // the double-edged blade of science // From liberal to class revolution // the dawn of U.S. imperialism // the United States is not a country // The Guatemalan coup and the moral flattening of the world // the complicity of the media // modernity, magic, villainy, nuance // history is not over

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Interstitial music by La Guacharaca: https://jzaratech.wixsite.com/elvalledelbrujo/la-musica

Theme music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-8667188 Tue, 08 Jun 2021 12:00:00 -0400 4120 3 full false Memory of Fire, Vol. I: Genesis by Eduardo Galeano Memory of Fire, Vol. I: Genesis by Eduardo Galeano Memory of Fire, a trilogy written by Eduardo Galeano between 1981-86 while in exile from his native Uruguay, traces the history of the Americas from the earliest periods of European contact through conquest, colonization, independence, revolutions, imperialism and globalization. Composed of short, fictionalized vignettes depicting historical figures at iconic moments, scenes of daily life, class conflict and encounters with the natural world, Memory of Fire recasts history as a collective, human process unfolding in cyclical, mythic time. While it emphasizes the agency and experiences of women, indigenous, the enslaved and the exploited, it is unflinching in its depiction of the brutal and compromised humanity of the powerful.

In part one of our two-part discussion, we talk with guest Andrés Black about prophecy, mamey fruit, conquistadors drinking molten gold, the tragic figure La Malinche, and the rest of it. The past is the present, and we are our ancestor’s living dreams.

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Interstitial music by La Guacharaca: https://jzaratech.wixsite.com/elvalledelbrujo/la-musica

Theme music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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Music by Ex-Official

Art by Eli Mack

]]> Memory of Fire, a trilogy written by Eduardo Galeano between 1981-86 while in exile from his native Uruguay, traces the history of the Americas from the earliest periods of European contact through conquest, colonization, independence, revolutions, imperialism and globalization. Composed of short, fictionalized vignettes depicting historical figures at iconic moments, scenes of daily life, class conflict and encounters with the natural world, Memory of Fire recasts history as a collective, human process unfolding in cyclical, mythic time. While it emphasizes the agency and experiences of women, indigenous, the enslaved and the exploited, it is unflinching in its depiction of the brutal and compromised humanity of the powerful.

In part one of our two-part discussion, we talk with guest Andrés Black about prophecy, mamey fruit, conquistadors drinking molten gold, the tragic figure La Malinche, and the rest of it. The past is the present, and we are our ancestor’s living dreams.

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Interstitial music by La Guacharaca: https://jzaratech.wixsite.com/elvalledelbrujo/la-musica

Theme music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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Music by Ex-Official

Art by Eli Mack

]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-8595775 Wed, 26 May 2021 19:00:00 -0400 4963 3 full true Embassytown by China Mieville Embassytown by China Mieville We discuss Embassytown, China Miéville's weird science fiction novel about a colonial outpost confronted by sudden upheaval and insurgency. We get wrapped up in allegory, metaphor, and how living through crisis can sometimes be the only way to find the necessary language for survival.

What is a Trotskyist? // October, Miéville's history of the Russian Revolution // untranslatable language and the conflation of the sign and the signifier // writing about colonialism without allegory // the Opium Wars // humans as similes // fantasy racism // The Festival of Lies // the latent violence of the colonial order // utopian uncertainty // the marks of insurgency on the body // the gestural nature of language // becoming politically activated // why read science fiction politically? // transformation through struggle // literacy and cognition

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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Art by Eli Mack

]]> We discuss Embassytown, China Miéville's weird science fiction novel about a colonial outpost confronted by sudden upheaval and insurgency. We get wrapped up in allegory, metaphor, and how living through crisis can sometimes be the only way to find the necessary language for survival.

What is a Trotskyist? // October, Miéville's history of the Russian Revolution // untranslatable language and the conflation of the sign and the signifier // writing about colonialism without allegory // the Opium Wars // humans as similes // fantasy racism // The Festival of Lies // the latent violence of the colonial order // utopian uncertainty // the marks of insurgency on the body // the gestural nature of language // becoming politically activated // why read science fiction politically? // transformation through struggle // literacy and cognition

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-8411597 Mon, 26 Apr 2021 23:00:00 -0400 4920 2 full true The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini Balestrini’s breathless novel of student and worker rebellion during the upheaval of the 1970s in Italy follows its unnamed narrator through student occupations, wildcat strikes and sabotage, the formation of squatted social centers, and the fracturing of left autonomism into armed bands of would-be urban insurgents. The joy of young people claiming space and infrastructure contrasts with crushing scenes of prison brutality on the part of a state attempting to wrest control back from its populace, and women militants begin to self-organize, challenging the chauvinism of their male counterparts.

We talk about official and autonomous communism, anti-work feelings, the experience of aging, machismo, armed movements, the malignance of the U.S. anti-Communist order, alpine skiing as a fugitive tactic, and the political possibilities of reading and writing.

**This episode was recorded in May 2021, weeks prior to the George Floyd uprisings.**

The Unseen: https://www.versobooks.com/books/1033-the-unseen

Notes and references:

Bergman and Montgomery’s Joyful Militancy: https://joyfulmilitancy.com/

A nice general reflection on the politics of joy and sadness. Check out the full interview with Silvia Federici in the appendix. 

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics https://libcom.org/library/autonomia-post-political-politics

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, this is a collection of (mostly theoretical) texts from Italy’s Autonomist movement in the 1970s.

Italy 1977: Living with an Earthquake https://libcom.org/library/italy-1977-8-living-earthquake-red-notes

Paul Ginsborg: A Contemporary History of Italy 

https://bookshop.org/books/a-history-of-contemporary-italy-society-and-politics-1943-1988/9781403961532

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> Balestrini’s breathless novel of student and worker rebellion during the upheaval of the 1970s in Italy follows its unnamed narrator through student occupations, wildcat strikes and sabotage, the formation of squatted social centers, and the fracturing of left autonomism into armed bands of would-be urban insurgents. The joy of young people claiming space and infrastructure contrasts with crushing scenes of prison brutality on the part of a state attempting to wrest control back from its populace, and women militants begin to self-organize, challenging the chauvinism of their male counterparts.

We talk about official and autonomous communism, anti-work feelings, the experience of aging, machismo, armed movements, the malignance of the U.S. anti-Communist order, alpine skiing as a fugitive tactic, and the political possibilities of reading and writing.

**This episode was recorded in May 2021, weeks prior to the George Floyd uprisings.**

The Unseen: https://www.versobooks.com/books/1033-the-unseen

Notes and references:

Bergman and Montgomery’s Joyful Militancy: https://joyfulmilitancy.com/

A nice general reflection on the politics of joy and sadness. Check out the full interview with Silvia Federici in the appendix. 

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics https://libcom.org/library/autonomia-post-political-politics

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, this is a collection of (mostly theoretical) texts from Italy’s Autonomist movement in the 1970s.

Italy 1977: Living with an Earthquake https://libcom.org/library/italy-1977-8-living-earthquake-red-notes

Paul Ginsborg: A Contemporary History of Italy 

https://bookshop.org/books/a-history-of-contemporary-italy-society-and-politics-1943-1988/9781403961532

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-8261951 Fri, 02 Apr 2021 14:00:00 -0400 4307 1 full true Introduction Introduction Why the Unseen Book Club? How is it that everything is political but it is so difficult to act politically? How can Spinoza help us answer that question? Long readings of Italo Calvino and Andrei Platonov.
 
Dan and Max become friends and experiment with the podcast form at the temporary expense of decent audio quality.
 
**EPISODE RECORDED IN MAY 2020**
 
https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> Why the Unseen Book Club? How is it that everything is political but it is so difficult to act politically? How can Spinoza help us answer that question? Long readings of Italo Calvino and Andrei Platonov.
 
Dan and Max become friends and experiment with the podcast form at the temporary expense of decent audio quality.
 
**EPISODE RECORDED IN MAY 2020**
 
https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

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]]> The Unseen Book Club Buzzsprout-8223124 Sat, 27 Mar 2021 20:00:00 -0400 1500 0 full true