If you are going to be any use to organisations and individuals in a multitude of different fields, you need to know something concerning just about everything.So for many years I’ve started my day with the Arts & Letters Daily website – http://www.aldaily.com/. Each day I read several of the articles, essays and reviews they have selected from a multitude of newspapers and journals from around the world on every subject under the sun. And once a morning I print off one item for closer scrutiny.
I have never known who was behind it, but the death last week of Professor Denis Dutton, and the swag of obituaries on every continent, has revealed all.
Denis Dutton was born in Los Angeles in 1944. He took a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1966, joined the Peace Corps and went to India, where he learned to play the sitar. After taking his PhD back in California, he lectured in American universities and started a journal, “Philosophy and Literature”.
In 1984 he moved with his family to New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and it was from there that he launched Arts & Letters Daily on the internet in 1998. It now has some 3.7 million page views per month.
“A few years ago,” he told an interviewer, “Bill Gates was boasting that we'll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes. Let's expand ourselves intellectually.”
Dutton was renowned as a continuous fountain of ideas. Another of them was the “Bad Writing Award” for academic works. Perhaps this might be revived.
Do you visit http://www.aldaily.com/ ?
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