The Unseen Book Club – Details, episodes & analysis

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 1000 Voices Collective members 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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Music by Ex-Official

Art by Eli Mack