As fans

I demonstrated how, even though Samuel Beckett's First Love and Other Stories, is in fact taller and wider than my Livre de Poche edition of Nerval's Sylvie, the latter being thinner makes it a much better fan in this weather, and that The Cultural Cringe by A. A. Phillips, although very slightly taller than the Nerval, a fraction thinner and much the same width, loses what it gains in height and loses in depth by a textured cover that bends less easily and must trap the air.

Knocking Wagner onto the floor

She maintained that she only held on to her assertion that Wagner was kitsch, quoting from Kundera here  -- in fact quoting Kundera's definition of kitsch which was the kitsch that mattered, as she said, in this culture of ours which pretends that kitsch is only the tooth bling of the TV characters Kath and Kim, when in fact it makes grow all our most noblest bad lines and seemingly moving endings -- only holding onto this assertion about Wagner even if she didn't know anything about Wagner -- since she was seized with an urge to destroy. And besides, against her admittedly more knowledgeable friend's flat dismissal of everything she had to say, it was always preferable to knock Wagner onto the floor than do anything else.

Writing the treatise

Although I actually said: every time I pick up Gitta Honegger's biography of Thomas Bernhard, a mosquito circles around me, trying to bite my hands, she thought I had said Thomas a Becket, and from this evolved an entirely different conversation from the one I might have had about this writer that nobody around me has read -- or entomology, of course, since mosquitoes have formed the one long plague of these past several weeks, and to think otherwise, as I harangued her later, you would have to have been living in a fridge or the very interior of an abandoned lime works, merrily writing the treatise your companion, at the point of homicidal mania, has been trying to write for years.

A woman cogently arguing with no one

Just to list them: first a woman cogently arguing with no one, unless it was the toddler, who wasn't answering; second, a woman in a long-sleeved glittering top in the heat pulling along a young child who pulled along with him a flowering plant that was soon pulled out of the soil; third, an elderly golden retriever trailing a long black udder in the lawn.

Finally: when crossing the park, is it better to walk in the grey rut that everyone has worn in the grass or to walk, as I do for no clear reason, about a metre parallel?

Happiness from a rascal

When I told her that I would never give money to the particular busker we saw pocketing the gold coins some people had given him, presumably so that the contents of his guitar case might continue to look pathetic, she said how, when she'd given him two dollars a week ago and he'd thanked her and told her she'd been the first to give anything all morning, even someone saying that he had just said the same thing to her had failed to erase the stupid lightheaded happiness she was experiencing -- the kind of happiness from a rascal, as she said, you'd like to see cuffed.