his thing that summer was crickets
The Washington Post has a new ZZ Packer story, "Pita Delicious" (registration required).That one day, when everything went wrong, Gideon was working on his dissertation, which meant he was in cutoffs in bed with me, the fan whirring over us while he was getting political about something or other. He was always getting political, even though his PhD had nothing to do with politics and was called "Temporal Modes of Discourse and Ekphrasis in Elizabethan Poetry." Even he didn't like his dissertation. He was always opening some musty book, reading for a while, then closing it and saying, "You know what's wrong with these facist corporations?" No matter how you responded, you'd always be wrong because he'd say, "Exactly!" then go on to tell you his theory, which had nothing to do with anything you'd just said.
