Thanks for the link, paigect, I missed the performance and figured I'd have to wait until the DVD came out. I forgot about how everything shows up on YouTube. I'm a long-time admirer of Pete Seeger too, and have been a member of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization for years. The member sails were a great experience (no, Pete Seeger wasn't on the boat and I never met him). Did you know that there's a movement to nominate Pete Seeger for a Nobel Peace Prize? Sounds good to me. sooey: I'm afraid I did more shoveling than dancing yesterday. Speaking about the speed of the internet, I read yesterday about how Obama used a shaka hand sign to acknowledge his high school band. I'd never heard of this, so of course I googled it. The Wikipedia entry for "Shaka sign" had already been updated to include Obama's use of it. I just checked again, and it now includes a photo as well (see the footnote). Claire

About nine years ago, I began reading The Black Book, and halfway throught it, it got dense. I stopped. Several months later, I picked up the book again, skipped those chapters, and finished reading it. It was OK. Now I have Snow, but have not read it yet. On Wednesday I went to Barnes & Noble and was surprised that there was not a single display of Orhan Pamuk's books (they usually display prominently award-winning authors and books, as some of you are most likely aware). I couldn't help but wonder if it would have been different had an American writer won the Prize...

Quite frankly, most Americans have never even heard of this author, myself included. I heard the announcement on the radio yesterday. Thehe announcer mentioned that few of his books have been translated into English. I did a quick search on Amazon and did not see any English translations of his books. There are Americans who read fiction in languages other than English, but there not very many of us. Rosefolly

I've been a fan of Alice Munro's work for many years. To me it's not so much that she's Canadian through and through, and her work gives us a picture of some Canadian lives, but that she calls attention to the lives of women who aren't spectacularly distinguished in any way except in their very survival under less than ideal conditions. So often a story of hers will center around a woman who has worked or struggled very hard, with little reward. Figuring in her stories distinguishes them--for all time, one hopes.