| UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER THE ONLINE HOME OF EUROPE'S PREMIER CULTURAL JOURNAL |
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F R O M T H E
F R O N T L I N E :
18/05/08: SNOWMAN, RE-IMAGINED 'When I try to recall her best outfits, I am invariably seized by a storm of indecision and jealousy. A part of me would never be seen dead in any of them; another part wants nothing more than to arrive at parties dressed as a Hoopoe or (as she described one outfit) a 'snowman, re-imagined by a Martian'. Some would (and indeed, do) call it quirky, but it’s more than that. There’s nothing whimsical about it. It’s a case of well-thought out, thoroughly earnest capriciousness.....' Heidi Kohlenberg introduces Thomas Stippel's review of Donna Devoni's novel, Hotwiring Honolulu 12/05/08: IMPLICATIONS OF IGNOBILITY 'As it happens, I was one of the few who didn’t support Pedrik, which means that I’m one of the few who can still openly profess to like him. I knew he’d garner enough votes from elsewhere, and used my influence to encourage Alma Pedrova’s 'Another Form of Laughter' instead (it says a lot for the nature of my influence that this book never made it to the list, though it did make the shortlist for a Spanish literary prize the following year, for which I did receive some of the authorial favours I had been, ahem, fishing for all along)' Jinpes Terenk reviews C P Pedrik's 'The Ignoble Trilogy' 3/05/08: GRINS AND WINKS FROM GOD 'Robert Sevré had a lot of that most unfashionable thing: faith. He believed in what he was doing, whatever it was, to the extent that many thought him a wily satirist. Who could be so earnest? He must be having us on. But he wasn’t. "God doesn’t smile on me as such," he once explained - "but he grins and winks a lot. We’re symbiotic, see". But of course, no one ever did see..' Tristan Sard and Robert Sevré - another recollection by Georgy Riecke 23/04/08: FROM A MAN TO A PARROT 'I was talking to Kurt Tens the other day. A large party had assembled in a small room, and there was, as Jean-Paul Sartre once put it, ‘No Exit’. Luckily I was crammed against a large plate of smoked-salmon hors d’oeuvre. It was something to behold; my lips almost leapt from my face in their enthusiasm. You should have seen it. And yet, for all the gifts that this sweet life of ours offers us, there is almost always a sting in the tail, a fly in the soup, a tiger in the bread bin. In this case, there were two...' At last, a review of Ivan Zech's 'With Apologies to his Sister's Parrot' 18/04/08: TREACLE AND BEAGLES 'I took care that evening to make countless comparisons between this unknown lady and my wife; comparisons in which the latter was always seen to emerge the victor. ‘Your eyebrows are Bach; hers are barely Telemann’ was, I believe, the decisive comment; the one that finally tipped the balance back in my favour. My wife’s weak-spot has always been her eyebrows. Compliment them and you’re in the money. Not that I should be telling you this...' Speyer in Spring - a recollection by Underneath the Bunker editor Georgy Riecke 12/04/08: I WILL BUTTON MUSH YOU 'The official - or should I say officially envious? - line is this: the folk at Widgeon Press are not publishers. They are a pack of designers. They create pretty products. Oh the fonts they use! You could peal those letters off the page and pop them in your wallet as keepsakes. And those front covers! Temptresses all of them. Bookshop sirens. Buy me, buy me, buy me, why why why won’t you buy me?' Adrian der Linger on Solos Seeep's 'AAA: The Lost Room' 26/03/08: THE SADLY DEPARTED TIT 'Witness, for instance, the somewhat freakish ‘Tomb of the Albino Squirrel’, a small-scale riff on Jacques Voiles’s monument to his son Eugene. Or the small but stately ‘Grave of the Great Tit’, a blatant riposte to the O’Connell memorial, with its nine tiny Corinthian columns and minute metopes, each containing a roughly painted scene of a day in the life of the sadly departed tit...' The second part of a new D H Laven article, exploring The Death Sheds of Colney Rise. Other articles by this esteemed art historian can be found on this page. 18/03/08: GOOD TASTE, BAD TASTE 'Good taste, bad taste: the line is finer than the lissom belly of a wispy ballerina. There are even distinctions to be made within the terms themselves. Within ‘bad taste’, for instance, there is good old ‘bad taste’ (pink porcelain cockatoos) and, hold the giggles for a second, ‘in bad taste’ (The Royal Family bathing in a trough of elephant dung). To say that the death sheds of Colney Rise (and all that they encompass) fit either one of these models would not be entirely accurate. At times, they court both...' The first part of a new D H Laven article, exploring The Death Sheds of Colney Rise. The second part will be published shortly. 9/03/08: BOREDOM AND BUTTERCUPS 'No writer was ever in better company than when writing about gardens. What words, what words! Azalea, chrysanthemum, agapanthus, brambles, buttercup… I’ll stop whilst I can, otherwise I never shall. Talk about the garden of lovely words. Yes, you are assured of good prose amongst the roses, of words that sparkle and glow: that endlessly radiate mystery. The vowels blossom forth as the consonants crackle on the tongue like October leaves trampled underfoot...' Jinpes Terenk reviews 'With a Brief Grin: Memoir of a Gun-Toting Madman' by Niklas Naramaratov 26/02/08: PATHETIC PHALLIC PARODY? 'The quotation reminds me of a theory I once heard concerning the Creation. God, it seems, had always planned to create the world in nine days. He had it all worked out: it was a nine day project, from start to finish. The rest he took on day seven was no more than an interlude; a bit of breathing space before going on to complete the job on days eight and nine. But, as it happens, a lot of thinking went on in that day. And before you know it, the restless creator was onto a new idea...' Georgy Riecke reviews Dinos Tierotis's 'Perseus and the Pepper Grinder' (from the Greatest Novels list) 13/02/08: MR INEVITABLE ON SOLOMON STREET 'So there I was on the Strand, stooping like a tramp in the thick London fog (a rare commodity these days, but hear me when I say that I’m not putting it in for effect) when who should I bump into but the Czech novelist Karan Jlcawkzca? Now I think of it, I rather suspect that she bumped into me, but what matter? In any case there was small collision...' Heidi Kohlenberg reviews a book by Karan Jlcawkzca 30/01/08: MISUNDERSTANDING EGGS 'Honestly, I wasn’t as foolish as you may think I was. I was not completely ignorant either – not of life, anyway, though perhaps of the way in which life is filtered through fiction. Yes, that’s what I didn’t understand. The cunning metaphors were beyond me. The sneaky details gave me the slip. If it didn’t hit me in the face it didn’t hit me at all. Nuances escaped me, no trouble..' Perci Hammershoi reviews another of our Greatest Novels: ciâ cheva's 'understanding eggs' 20/01/08: POLITICAL MANGOES "I ask her about the mangoes. They are, she assures me, ‘deeply political - deeply deeply political’ She thinks about this for a couple of seconds, before adding ‘ephemerally speaking, that is’. ‘Distinctly’, I reply. ‘Undoubtedly’ comes the return volley, before I hit the net with a mumbled ‘indeed’. It’s one of many thrillingly obscure conversations we share, in which neither of us are quite sure of what direction we are going in (although you sometimes get the sense that this is the very direction she is heading for)" Adventurous art historian D H Laven returns. Laetitia Blauman is his inscrutable subject. 13/01/08: IMAGINARY ASCENSION This year's Hendrik Stofferson Award for an Autobiography Of No More Than Five Sentences goes to the Andorran novelist Oa Aayorta, whose symbolic two sentence offering is reproduced, in full, below: "I painted on the wall a mural of my ascent over it. This filled me with hope - though in the time taken to complete the painting I had missed the opportunity to ascend for real." More Aayorta here. 01/01/08: HAPPY NEEDLESPEENIAN YEAR 'Though he drinks only water, Needlespleen believes himself to be eternally drunk; which suggests that either someone has informed him that he is not drinking water, or else he is deluding himself. Or perhaps his drunkenness comes from elsewhere. Perhaps he is intoxicated by something other than alcohol. Perhaps the real alcohol is his imagination....' At the Court of Sir Francis Needlespleen - an article by Georgy Riecke 12/12/07: FICTION: THE ULTIMATE MAKEOVER? 'Upon first looking into Egor Falastrom’s 'Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher', I felt as though the sweet hands of love were slapping me tenderly in the face. The soft light of the setting sun crawled through a gap in my bedroom curtains and bestowed upon my grasping fingers a luminous glow. It was as if sticks of gold had grown from my hand...' Joy de Vejean reviews Egor Falastrom's 'Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher' 1/12/07: NOTES ON A TRANSLATOR'S NOVEL 'Things soon arranged themselves, as they say, into the pattern and shape of a pear. Bravery is all very well, but to say that it rarely pays off is to vastly overestimate the state of affairs. Though perfectly, if not fabulously familiar with fiction, it was foolish of Veers to think that the world of words was his for the taking. Fortunately, it did not take too much time for him to realise this; to understand that the best way for a translator to write a novel would be to pretend that he or she was not in fact writing a novel at all....' Jinpes Terenk reviews 'Poppies, Book One' by Jaymer Veers The Modern Bookshop acts as pimp to a depraved collection 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; 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 online is not a static resource. It reserves the right to remove
articles and
reviews at will.
Underneath
the
Bunker publishes work only
by cultural 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’ September 2005 |
|
Closing
lines:
'It is a far far better thing that I should end here; regardless of the fact that I haven't told you everything, it is far far better thing that I should stop boring you.' ('A Tale of Pity' by Maximillian Melmoth-Blooth ) |