[What better place to start than with a manifesto? Five years ago, a team of Underneath the Bunker contributors got together at The Crippled Bee to fashion a succinct statement of our critical aims and ideals. The vast majority of the team got drunk instead, leaving a couple of us to scribble the following, somewhat scrappy list, the rough edges of which I have smoothed for the benefit of present-day readers]
UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER ONLINE: THE MANIFESTO
- The Modern Bookshop acts as pimp to a depraved line-up of sordid literature. When it comes to execrable drivel, the Modern Reader is spoiled for choice. The sickening effect of this situation is evident in the collapse of European society and culture.
- Underneath the Bunker Online is the deformed child of the eponymous journal, a periodical dedicated to the best (though not necessarily the most popular) examples of European art and literature; a critically acclaimed publication that has for several months drawn the attention of the intelligentsia to those works which the carrion crows of popular criticism have overlooked.
- Every child differs from its parents in subtle ways. Underneath the Bunker online is not simply an online version of the magazine. Though it shares the same meritorious intentions, it differs in content, presenting both a small selection of articles from the magazine and unique features for which the magazine may not have found room.
- Underneath the Bunker online also acts as a resource for those seeking information concerning its associated publishing house ‘Upside-Down-Then-Backwards’ and may occasionally offer web-users the opportunity to read sample chapters from specially selected works
- Underneath the Bunker only publishes work by those critics who refuse to pander to public opinion and have proved themselves worthy by spending a certain amount of years in the bohemian wilderness. We are not interested in the next big thing. We work in the present.
- Any person attempting to pass off work that appears on Underneath the Bunker online as their own will be personally tracked down and forced to listen to all ninety-eight hours of the audiotape version of Pieter Gordnersson’s The Incredibly Dull Journey of Rodrik Sanchez and his Donkey
[AFTERTHOUGHTS: I stand, of course, by the execrable drivel comment. Who can deny the majority of that on which modern readers sup up is of inferior quality? We are offered roast lamb: we choose to lick the sawdust off the table-legs. As for the rest: it does what it does. I wonder, however, at the closing comments. Would Gordnersson's book really prove such a torture? I must confess that I am beginning to understand his work a little better - albeit in book-form. The audio-tape (recorded, I believe, by Pieter's cousin Frank) is another matter entirely...]
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[...] Underneath the Bunker 30 07 2010 [The original Underneath the Bunker Manifesto represented, as I have hinted, something of a compromise. The article below was, thus, my attempt, [...]