/lit/ - Literature

>>11422210
>they don't call it the country of cultural cringe for nothing

>The Cringe mainly appears in a tendency to make needless comparisons. The Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself, “Yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think of this?” No writer can communicate confidently to a reader with the “Yes, but” habit; and this particular demand is curiously crippling to critical judgement.
>There is a certain type of Australian intellectual who is forever sidling up to the cultivated Englishman, insinuating “I, of course, am not like these other crude Australians. I understand how you must feel about them; I should be more at home in Oxford or Bloomsbury” (the use of Bloomsbury as a symbol of intellectuality is badly out of date; but, then, so as a rule is the Australian Cringer).
>“... in the back of the Australian mind, there sits a minatory Englishman. He is not even the most suitable type of Englishman—not the rare pukka sahib with his deep still pool of imaginativeness, and his fine urbanity; not the common man with his blending of solidity and tenderness: but that Public School Englishman with his detection of a bad smell permanently engraved on his features, who has left a trail of exasperation through Europe and of smouldering hatred through the east, and whose indifference to the Commonwealth is not even studied.
>“Subconsciously the educated man feels a guilty need to placate this shadowy figure (Freud has a name for it). His ghost sits in on the tete-a-tete between Australian reader and writer, interrupting in the wrong accent.

The BioShock series.

Infinite is tryhard, but 1 and 2 are top. Excellent dialogue, compelling story, short prose, beautiful, absurd environment.

Faulkner is the goddamn man. He wrote the novel that was essentially the pinnacle of the modernist era (this being The Sound and the Fury), remade the Southern gothic genre, the motherfucker lived above a brothel for some time just drinking, smoking, and writing, honing his craft all the while cause he was too full of himself to do anything but write, and if you read The Paris Review's Art of Fiction on him, I think you'll find he is the most Southern gentleman you'll ever see. He is the dusty, slow, dark way to death, he's probably shook hands with death and lived on the get a Nobel Prize. Simple in prose yet immensely complex in structure.

I named one of my nuts after Faulkner.