Mario, the Bolex, and Avril on sadness (p. 760)
The open book on top facing Mario is Dowty, Wall and Peters’s seminal Introduction to Montague Semantics, [n.317] which has very fascinating illustrations that Mario doesn’t look at this time, trying to film the cock of the Moms’s head and the phone’s extended antenna against the cumulus of her hair from behind, capturing her back unawares.
Context
Mario, strolling E.T.A. with the head-mounted Bolex, films his mother unawares in her blazing-lit office late at night. What's open on her desk is a real book — Dowty, Wall and Peters's formal-semantics classic (endnote 317 prices it) — Avril's prescriptivism sitting on a foundation of genuine heavyweight linguistics. "Very fascinating illustrations" is the narration leaning into Mario's register about a book that famously contains almost nothing but formal notation.