I first came across the idea of a Chautauqua when I read Robert M. Pirsig’s novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in the late 1970s. Pirsig explained that a Chautauqua was a series of talks that travelled around the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century. It covered wide-ranging cultural topics and aimed to explain and to entertain. Pirsig wanted his book to be a kind of Chautauqua because he admired its seriousness and ambition. He felt that modern media (by which he meant TV, film and radio) had trivialised human discourse. He claimed that “we’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get the chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness.” This was in 1974, a decade before domestic personal computers and 20 years before the widespread use of the internet. One wonders what he now thinks in his late 80s of Twitter and other social media. Comparing the national consciousness to a stream he states “in this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into the old ones”. My topics are not new ones; they are just my hobbies – books, art, film, TV, music and photos. Pirsig finished his stream metaphor with the words “some channel deepening is called for”. I agree. This is my Chautauqua.