A person need not add something at the level of Beethoven's works, or Newton's Principia to qualify as a culturateur, by the way. A collection of poems may well be enough. From this, it follows that there are levels of culturateurs. My off the top of my head guess is ten.

A word I came up with yesterday may fill out my set of terms for those who try to add to World Culture, "superfluteur"--soo PUR fluh TERR, or producer of superfluous works of culture.

Ever the egocentric, as my readers must know by now, I often worry or wonder, depending on my mood, which of the three categories I fit into. Actually, I never think for a moment that I'm a superfluteur. There's an easy way of proving this, I think: if you admire only what the establishment in your field admires (or once admired, if you're particularly backward), then you are a superfluteur, regardless of whether your work gains recognition or not. If it doesn't, then--alas--you are a beta superfluteur. But if magazines like the Hudson Review or the New Yorker publish it, you are an alpha superfluteur. My biased opinion is that ninety percent of our country's known poets are superfluteurs.

I certainly don't only admire what the poetry establishment admires, although I admire some of it, and I admire almost nothing that the psychology establishment admires. Ergo, I am either a culturateur or an aberrateur.

Nuts, I just thought of a possible exception to what I've been saying about superfluteurs-- there may be unfortunates out there who claim not to admire what the establishment in their field admires yet are superfluteurs--because their work is just like what the establishment in their field admires or formerly admired in all important respects, although they don't realize it. So, a superfluteur either consciously or unconsciously only admires what the establishment in his field admires or formerly admired. According to the consensus of knowledgeable judges of his work--which, yes, make the determination sometimes subjective but 99% valid, it seems to me.

Hmm, maybe I have a better way of putting it: a superfluteur either admires only what the establishment in his field admires or formerly admired--OR admires nothing. That would make the definition objective enough.

There are also the amiable superfluteurs who claim to admire everything. All I can say about them is that I don't consider their admiration of work not admired now or in the past by the establishment in their field genuine--due to their work's being like what that establishment has praised at one time or another in all important respects. And we're back in subjectivity.

In any case, no one's ever accused me of liking only what the establishments in my two main fields, poetry and psychology, favor, or of not doing work those establishments would ignore if not condemn if they knew about it. So I'm either a culturateur or an aberrateur. Tune in tomorrow to find out which, maybe.