No.75: Crossword. He'd never laboured over a crossword puzzle in his entire life when, the day before yesterday, he looked at one with fresh eyes and suddenly felt he had found an absorbing subject for painting: the puzzle's composition was endlessly shiftable, modular, its graphic rigidity softened and deepened by the numbering of the white squares. What he had taken to be time-squandering blank-filling trap (so akin to the forms so beloved of bureaucracies), seemed instead to be a gnomic kind of utterance, a linguistic provocation, a semantic proto-narrative, a cognitive bit-map. He was cautiously ecstatic. Hadn't anyone else settled upon the same subject?