eGODs

and ancient impersonal malice.

Paris, 2024. Shot by me.

I have an ex-boyfriend who read Proust as an act of self-aggrandisement. All several thousand pages of Lost Time. He went in search thereof.

A busy man, he liked to imagine himself a secret lord of leisure, with nothing but hours to spend reading Proust in the bath.

He took from this, I think, the satisfaction that reading Proust in his scant leisure hours signified that he was in fact a man of culture and learning, despite his mind-numbing day job.

It was a currency: big book energy, on dates and in chit-chat outside conference rooms, as a cultured stand-in for big dick energy.

Big book energy as the new big dick energy.

Big book brandishment as a competitive act. Competitive reading.

It’s rife online. Have you read Infinite Jest? Don’t even look at me sideways if you haven’t.

I’ve read all the big books: my dick is HUGE.

Did you get all the way through Don DeLillo’s Underworld?

How about the dense 300 or so pages of woman-slaughter at the heart of 2666? Did you …