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My first interest was symbolism. I began to go down to the twenty-fourth Street Library just just east of Valencia. The books were on the second floor, and immediately entering the building through wood and glass swinging doors, you walked up a wide flight of marble steps with probably an oak rail along each wall. I would go up and look at art books. I studied European painting mostly, looking for symbolism as message. I studied color, vertical and horizontal positioning and placement for status and hierarchy, the meaning of the number of things and such-like.
Back around nineteen sixty-two, I saw an interesting show on public television. It was about a painting painted by Pieter the Elder Bruegel, showing a wedding in a barn, and the subject of the show was to figure out who the bridegroom was. Took them thirty minutes and I found it fascinating.
Which recalls an incident of about that time. I had been flirting with a woman maybe in her late teens by eye, toward the late afternoon when the library was the busiest of the day. I would watch her but made no overt moves. At some time I noticed her put a book very deliberately into the stacks and I made a note of its location. After she left I went and found what I thought was the book, one that
protruded from the rest slightly. A particular page was corner folded and on that page was indicated in some manner maybe pencil, a passage which referred to another book. I went and found the other book and it referred to another. I was real excited. This was really fun. I thought I was on the trail of the feminine Holy Grail.
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