29 March 2004. I'm in my null zone again. I thought I might skip an entry here for the first time. I thought I'd skip a session at Paint Shop for the first time, as well. But then I figured I could spend a few minutes there scribbling any old thing, and get credit. I sorta liked the two images that resulted, though, so am posting them here.

The second is a variation on the first. I don't know what I'll do with them.

As I looked at my pieces once I had posted them, the second reminded me of Paul Klee's work. My next thought was about how much I think Klee would have loved Paint Shop or some similar program. Or maybe not. I don't think working with a brush should necessarily be superior to working with a mouse, or the equivalent, or more fun, but certainly working with various kinds of paint on various kinds of paper or other material allows one a much more hands-on feel of exploring a medium than working with Paint Shop. But the latter allows huge quick experiments conventional painting can't begin to provide: for instance, near-instantaneously making a negative of an image, or a mirror image of it. Or replacing one color anywhere in a painting with another color. Erasing. Combining images. All kinds of other things. . . .

I wasn't surprised at the resemblances in my image to certain works of Klee. He's my favorite all-time painter. As I thought about that, I hastened to tell myself--and whomever is reading this because by now I was thinking about writing down what I was thinking here--that I didn't consider Klee necessarily the greatest painter of all-time. Painters like Kandinsky and Pollack were definitely more important than he, for the reasons I gave in an earlier blog entry concerning effective poets versus important poets.

That got me ruminating on another topic I often rehash: cultural originality. For years I've held the opinion that the truly important culturateurs (i.e., those who make significant cultural breakthroughs, such as Planck, Archimedes, Monet, Cezanne, Beethoven, Cummings) are not necessarily those who first find out something or first use something, but the first who establish something culturally useful to a significant degree. This time through my opinion (I sometimes wonder if everybody repeats his opinions to himself as much as I do), I changed my mind slightly. Perhaps I'd been scanting firsters. Deciding I had, I proposed that there are originators and establishers/ The first are of importance, but the second are of greater importance. The Vikings and whatever Chinese, Phoenicians, Irishmen or East Asians who may have "discovered" America versus Columbus.

Energized as always by a chance to categorize (and judge!), I went on to posit two other kinds of culturateurs: extenders and . . . compenders. Klee would be a perfect example of an extender--one who masters something established and takes it to all kinds of new places. Shakespeare would be the compender nonpareil--one whose works are a veritable compendium of a whole range of established ideas or practices and their extensions. (No, I don't love "compender," but couldn't recall the appropriate word I'm fairly sure exists, so went with my coinage for now.)

I seem to have knocked out a geniune entry, after all. Paint Shop was a main reason for that, as was my reaching one of my main obsessions. I'm now set for tomorrow, too, for I remembered an essay of mine that should work nicely as a follow-up to the preceding while typing the latter. It's an essay I've had on the Internet for several years (and tried to get Howard Gardner to read--like more than one established sage, he informed me that he only reads "published material," meaning stuff in refereed journals, which nothing I write will ever make. I think almost no one has read it. It should be entertaining.