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ESTUDIO DE LA CIRCULACIÓN CORONARIA ARTERIAL DEL PERRO (Canis familiaris)
BÜLL, M. L. & MARTINS, M. R. F. B. Study of the arterial coronary circulation in the dog (Canis familiaris). Rev. Chil. Anat., 20(2):117-123, 2002
SUMMARY : Study on arterial coronary circulation was performed in 30 dog hearts, by using the dissection and clearing techniques. We observed that the heart is supplied by the right coronary artery (a. coronaria dextra) and three branches of the left coronary artery ( a. coronaria sinistra): paraconal interventricular ( ramus interventricularis paraconalis), septal ( ramus septales ) and circumflex arteries (ramus circumflexus). The left coronary artery arose from a trunk in the ventral aortic sinus and, when there was no trunk formation, it was found two different origins in the aorta, corresponding to the circumflex and paraconal interventricular arteries. The latter, after originating right anterior ventricular, left anterior ventricular and septal ventricular arteries, ended next to the heart apex. The circumflex artery presented its course to the left up to the atrial face, where it ended as subsinuous interventricular artery. Arising from the circumflex artery, it was found the auricular ( rami auricularis), ventricular ( rami ventricularis) and septal (rami septales) branches and branches to the atrio-ventricular node ( nodus atrio-ventricularis). The septal artery (ramus septales) was observed to be originated from the paraconal interventricular artery, with lower frequence of the left coronary artery and in two cases of the circumflex artery. The right coronary artery presented no arterial trunk. In that place, there were two separate origins in the aorta or 2-3 origins in a common sinus. This artery emitted auricular, ventricular branches and to the atrio-ventricular node.
KEY WORDS: 1. Anatomy; 2. Heart; 3. Coronary artery; 4. Dog.
Beside classical descriptions on coronary circulation in human (Testut, 1911; Chiarugi, 1943; Gardner et al., 1971; Gray, 1977) and pets (Miller et al., 1979; Sisson & Grossman, 1972; Schwarze & Schröder, 1970; Nickel et al., 1975 and Getty, 1981), there are detailed quotations on bull and goat (Hegasi, 1958), pig (Lumb et al., 1962 and Fehn et al., 1968), cock (Lindsay & Smith, 1965), ox (Bhargava & Beaver, 1970), cat and sheep (Hadziselimovic et al., 1980).
Presently, much emphasis has been given in experimental works in which the dog is the model animal (Donald & Essex, 1954; Christensen & Campeti, 1959; Bloor & Lowman, 1962; Rozman et al., 1962; Filho & Borelli, 1966; Lescure & Poirson, 1968; Andretto et al., 1973 and Pina & Pereira, 1973).
There is much information in textbooks on these arteries number and distribution territory. Generically, the coronary circulation is done by two main coronary arteries: the right and the left ones, beside their primary and secondary branches, however, intraspecific and interspecific differences are described (Gardner et al. and Sisson & Grossman). According to Miller et al., such circulation in dogs is established by four arteries: right coronary artery and three branches of the left coronary artery: septal, circumflex and anterior descending; such data were confirmed in 66% of cases examined by Donald & Essex.
Kazzaz & Shanklin, 1950 (apud Pina & Pereira) described that the right coronary artery seldom extends up to the right ventricle border and send branches to the right atrium. On the other hand, Pianetto (1939) states that the atrial branches are variable in development and confirms the presence of 4 to 9 ventricular branches from the right coronary artery.
According to Meek et al. (1929), Moore (1930), Pianetto and Kazzaz & Shanklin (apud Pina & Pereira), the atrial branch is longer than the others and is related to vascularization of the atrial sinus node. This ends by anastomosing with atrial branches which come from the circumflex branch. ]]>The left coronary artery, according to Miller et al., originates the circumflex, ventral and septal interventricular arteries, being that from these branches, ventricular and atrial secondary branches are originated. In his studies performed with dogs, Moore confirms that the left coronary artery arises from a trunk which, after short distance, is divided into circumflex, anterior descending and septal branches. On the other hand, Pianetto and Pina & Pereira found with certain frequency two left coronary arteries without emerging from a trunk, originating circumflex and anterior descending branches, while the septal branch in one third of the cases had independent origin. Paraconal and left circumflex interventricular branches arisen from a left coronary artery trunk is described by Andretto.
The objective of this study was to contribute to the systematization of arterial coronary circulation and, as much as possible, try to solve the problem of ischemic infarction of some myocardio areas.
It was studied the arteries of 30 adult dogs (Canis familiaris) of unknown family and age, both male and female, from Biotério Central at UNESP Botucatu Campus. The animals were sacrificed by using intravenous anesthesia of sodium pentabarbital (Nembutal). The sternal plastron was opened and the heart was along with the basal vessels. After suture, the coronary arteries were cannulated and washed with normal saline solution. Both arteries were injected with contrast through two different procedures:
A group of 20 hearts had their arteries injected with aqueous solution of neoprene latex colored with specific pigment. After 12 hours at 16°C, they were submerged in formalin 10%. After fixation, they were dissected under magnifying glass.
In other group of 10 animals, the coronary arteries were injected with gelatin (Anglo) solution colored with cinnabar.
The organs were cleared after Spalteholz method and the coronary arteries behavior was analyzed, described and photographed.
In our results, it was observed that the dog heart is supplied by four coronary arteries, being three of them branches of the left coronary (a. coronaria sinistra), paraconal interventricular (ramus interventricularis paraconalis), septal (ramus septales) and circumflex (ramus circunflexus) arteries, and right coronary artery (a. coronaria dextra).
The left coronary artery arose from a trunk in the ventral or left aortic sinus (Fig. 1a). However, in four animals there was no observation of a trunk formation, but two separate origins in the aorta corresponding to its two branches; circumflex and paraconal interventricular arteries (Fig. 1b). ]]>
Fig. 1 a. Observe the left coronary artery (LCA) and its branches: paraconal interventricular artery (PIA); circumflex artery (CA) and septal artery (SA).
Normally, the left coronary artery, soon after its origin, provides as terminal branches the paraconal interventricular and circumflex arteries; however, in 4 out of 20 cases, this artery also provided as terminal branch the septal artery (Fig. 1a).
Fig. 1b. Paraconal interventricular artery (PIA) with its right anterior ventricularbranches (RA) and left anterior (LA). Circumflex artery (CA), auricular (AB) and ventricular (VB) branches.
Fig. 1c. Circumflex artery (CA) and paraconal interventricular artery (PIA), originating separately from the aorta.
Fig. 2 a. Observe septal branch (SB) originating from the paraconal interventricularartery (PIA).
Fig. 2b. Septal branch (SR) and left anterior ventricular branch (LAVB) originating from a common trunk(*) of the paraconal interventricular artery (PIA).
Fig. 2 c. Septal branch (SB) and angular branch (AB) originating from a common trunk of the circumflex artery (CA). Angular artery (AA) originating from the paraconal interventricular artery (PIA).
The septal artery ( ramus septales) presented arising, in most cases, from the paraconal interventricular artery (Fig. 3a), with less frequency from the coronary artery (Fig. 1a), and only in two cases from the circumflex artery (Fig. 3b).
Fig. 3 a. Septal artery (SA) originating from the paraconal inter-ventricular artery (PIA); circumflex artery (CA).
Fig. 3b.Septal artery (SA) originating from the circumflex artery (CA); paraconal interventricular artery (PIA).
The third and last branch of the left coronary artery, the circumflex artery (Fig. 1a), in four cases only, presented independent origin in the aorta, although its absence has never been observed. It has a way to the left over the left atrial-ventricular groove (sulcus coronaries) up to the heart atrial face (facies atrialis) and, before ending as subsinuous interventricular artery (ramus interventricularis subsinuosus) (Fig. 3c), originated auricular collateral branches destined for irrigating the left atrium wall; ventricular branches which provided proximal branches (left ventricle auricular face), marginal (left ventricle margin) and distal (left ventricle atrial face) and, as last collateral branches, branches to atrio-ventricular node and septal branches
Fig. 3c.Circumflex artery (CA) ending as subsinuous interven-tricular artery (SIA).
In most cases, the subsinuous interventricular artery was observed as circumflex artery terminal branch, however, in 15 cases, after its origin, it was verified a very short branch that continued along the atrial-ventricular groove (Fig. 3d).
Fig. 3d. Circumflex artery (CA), subsinuous interventricular artery (SIA) and subsinuous artery branch (SB).
In most cases, the subsinuous interventricular artery anastomosed with the right coronary artery and ventricular branches of the paraconal interventricular artery. It emitted right posterior ventricular branches (right ventricle posterior wall), left posterior (left ventricle posterior wall) and septal branches (interventricular septum).
With regard to the right coronary artery, it was observed the absence of an arterial trunk in 26% of cases. In that place, there were two separate origins in the aorta; or even, two or three origins inside a common sinus. One of these branches irrigated the regions of the arterial cone and the other constituted the right coronary artery itself. In case of a third branch, it behaved as a proximal branch of the right coronary artery, spreading in the right ventricle auricular face (facies auricularis). This artery reached the atrio-ventricular groove and ended next to the subsinuous interventricular groove; emitted auricular and ventricular collateral branches, and to the atrio-ventricular node (Fig. 3e).
Fig. 3e. Aortic sinus with orifice of origin from the branch to the arterial cone (VC), orifice of origin from the artery to the auricular face (AF) and orifice of origin from the right coronary artery (RCA).
Similarly to our results, Moore, Lescure & Poirson and Andretto et al. described the origin of the right coronary artery from a trunk in the left ventral aortic sinus. On the other hand, Pianetto and Pina & Pereira, in studies performed in dogs, and Ahmed & Harrison (1971), in human, found out two independent origins in the aorta, corresponding to the origin of the circumflex and paraconal interventricular arteries without an arterial trunk, in a similar way to that we have observed in 4 cases. Our descriptions about terminal branches originated from this artery, that is, the paraconal interventricular and circumflex arteries, were confirmed by Lescure & Poirson, Andretto et al. and Pina & Pereira. The presence of the septal artery as third terminal branch is confirmed by Moore and Pina Pereira. The paraconal interventricular artery way through the paraconal interventricular groove was in accordance with previous studies by Moore, Pianetto, Christensen & Campeti, Bloor & Lowman, Lescure & Poirson and Pina & Pereira. The latter observed in 18.05% of cases the anastomosis of collateral branches of this artery with subsinuous interventricular artery branches; such behavior was observed by us in 80% of cases.
Previous studies by Moore described the presence of 4 to 6 right anterior ventricular branches; Pianetto, 3 to 5; Lescure & Poirson, 4 to 11 and Pina Pereira, 3 to 10 branches, being that we detected a range from 4 to 19 branches. The presence of left anterior ventricular branches as collateral branches of the paraconal interventricular artery is in accordance with previous descriptions by Lescure Poirson and Pina & Pereira. According to Moore, Pianetto and Pina & Pereira, these branches vary in numbers of 3 to 5, 3 to 7 and 4 to 17, respectively, and in our study we observed 5 to 23 branches. Among them, we found in 6 cases the angular artery; data corroborating with results by Pina & Pereira. In our observations, in most cases, the septal branches detached from the paraconal interventricular artery; in 12 cases, they detached from the left anterior ventricular branches; in 2 cases, from a trunk of the circumflex artery and, in 1 case, from a trunk of the paraconal interventricular artery. Similarly, Pianetto (1939) states that in 70% of the cases analyzed, the first septal branch arose from the paraconal interventricular artery and, in 30% directly from the coronary cavity. Pianetto (1939) suggests to this branch the name of septum ventricularum artery because it supplies the biggest part of the septum, however, Fehn et al. (1968) state that paraconal interventricular and circumflex arteries branches supply just a little portion of the interventricular septum.
In relation to the septal artery, our studies were in accordance with Pina & Pereira, Lescure & Poirson and Rozman et al. who state that this artery arises mainly from the paraconal interventricular artery. The origin of this artery from the left coronary artery is supported by Pina & Pereira. Pianetto and Pina &Pereira observed this artery originating directly from the aorta, which was not observed by us, or still from the aorta bifurcation point in paraconal interventricular and circumflex arteries (Christensen & Campeti and Rozman et al.)
In the analyzed hearts, the circumflex artery arose from the left coronary artery, agreeing with descriptions by Pina & Pereira. Although, Pianetto reports this artery originating beside the paraconal interventricular artery, without a common trunk as in human. ]]>Unlikely our findings, Ahmed & Harrison observed in 43% of human hearts the absence of this artery and state its replacement by the right coronary artery and its branches. In textbooks, studies agree with the circumflex artery division into auricular, ventricular, to auricular-ventricular node, septal and terminal branches, being the divergences as for their number (Bloor & Lowman; Pianetto; Moore; Pina & Pereira and Lescure & Poirson).
We observed, similarly to Pina & Pereira that the subsinuous interventricular artery was a terminal branch of the circumflex artery, however, in many cases, after its origin, many other branches arose and continued in the atrioventricular groove. In accordance with our results, Moore states that the subsinuous interventricular artery is an invariable continuation of the circumflex artery and never of the right coronary artery, according to Gross (apud Moore). We agree with Andretto et al. when they stated that the subsinuous interventricular branch is responsible for arterial irrigation of the right and left ventricles atrial face, as well of part of the interventricular septum.
In our studies, it was observed in 26% of cases the absence of an arterial trunk to the right coronary artery. In that place, we verified two separate origins in the aorta, or two or three origins in a common sinus. Pianetto describes in 40% of cases the presence of a main artery and an additional one, which is confirmed by Moore and Kazzaz & Shanklin. On the other hand, Bloor & Lowman could not visualize exactly the origin of the right coronary artery.
RESUMEN: El estudio de la circulación coronaria arterial fue realizado en 30 corazones de canes, aplicando técnicas de disección y diafanización. Verificamos que el corazón estaba irrigado por la arterias coronaria izquierda, arterias interventricular paraconal, septal y circunfleja. La arteria coronaria izquierda se originaba de un tronco en el seno aórtico ventral y, en los casos donde no hubo formación del tronco, encontramos dos orígenes separados en la aorta, correspondientes a las arterias circunfleja e interventricular paraconal. Esta última, después de originar ramas ventriculares ántero-derecha, ántero izquierda y septales, terminaba próxima al ápice del corazón. La arteria circunfleja presentaba un trayecto para la izquierda hasta la cara atrial, donde terminaba como arteria interventricular subsinuosa. Originándose de la arteria circunfleja encontramos las ramas atriales, ventriculares, septales y para el nódulo atrioventricular. La arteria septal, fue observada originándose de la arteria interventricular paraconal y con menor frecuencia de la arteria coronaria izquierda y, en dos casos, de la arteria circunfleja. La arteria coronaria derecha no presentaba tronco arterial. En lugar de éste, había dos orígenes separados en la aorta ó 2-3 orígenes dentro de un seno común. Esta arteria emitía ramas atriales, ventriculares y para el nódulo atrio-ventricular.
PALABRAS CLAVE: 1. Anatomía; 2. Corazón; 3. Arterias coronarias; 4. Perro.
Andretto, R.; Borelli, V. & Filho, A. F. Sobre a origem do Ramus descendes subsinouosus em cães. Rev. Fac. Med. Vet. Zootec. Univ. S. Paulo, 10:5-10, 1973. [ Links ]
Ahmed, S. H. & Harrison, R.G. Variations in human coronary arterial supply. J. Anat., 109:348, 1971. [ Links ]
Bhargava, I. & Beaver, C. Observations on the arterial supply and venous drainage of the bovine heart. Anat. Anz., 126:343-54, 1970. [ Links ]
Bloor, C. M. & Lowman, R.M. Radiological anatomy of coronary arteries of the dog. Circ. Res., 11:36-46, 1962. [ Links ]
Chiarugi, G. Instituizone dell Anatomia dellúomo. Milano Societá Editrice, 1943. [ Links ]
Christensen, G. C. & Campeti, F. L. Anatomical and functional studies of the coronary circulation in the dog and pig. Am. J. Vet. Res., 20:18-26, 1959. [ Links ]
Donald, D. E. & Essex, H. E. Pressure studies after inactivation of the major portion of the canine right ventricle. Am. J. Physiol., 176:155-61, 1954. [ Links ]
Fehn, P. A.; Howe, B. B. & Pesinger, R. R. Comparative anatomical studies of the coronary arteries of canine and porcine hearts. Acta Anat., 71:223-8, 1968. [ Links ]
Filho, A. F. & Borelli, V. Irrigação do nó sino-atrial em cães. Arq. Inst. Biol., 33(4):119-24, 1966. [ Links ]
Gardner, E.; Gray, D. J. & O'Rahilly, R. Anatomia: estudo regional do corpo humano. 3. ed. Rio de Janeiro, Guanabara Koogan, 1971. 790p. [ Links ]
Getty, R. Sisson and Grossman's Anatomy of the Domestic Animals. Philadelphia, Saunders, 1981. V1-2 [ Links ]
Getty, R. Anatomia dos animais domésticos. 5. ed. Rio de Janeiro, Interamericana, 1981. V 1-2 2000p. [ Links ]
Gray, H. F. R. S. Anatomia. 29. ed. Rio de Janeiro, Guanabara Koogan, 1977. 1147p. [ Links ]
Hadziselimovic, H.; Dilberovic, F. & Ovcina, F. Blood vessels of the human heart: coronariography and dissection.Acta Anat., 106:443-9, 1980. [ Links ]
Hegasi, A.H. Die Blutgefässversorgung des Herzens von Rind, Schaf und Zieg. Giessen, Med. Vet. Inaug. Diss., 1958. [ Links ]
Lescure, F. & Poirson, J.P. Sur l'artériographie coronariense chez le chien. Revue méd. vét., 119:217-40, 1968. [ Links ]
Lindsay, F. E. F. & Smith, J. H. Coronary arteries of Gallus domesticus. Amer. J. Anat., 116:301-14, 1965. [ Links ]
Lumb, G.; Hardy, L. B. & Singletary, H. P. Blood supply to the arterior ventricular node and bundle of Hiss. A comparative study in pig, dog and man. Amer. J. Path., 41:65-70, 1962. [ Links ]
Miller, M. E.; Christensen, G. C. & Evans, H. E. Anatomy of the dog. Philadelphia, W.B. Saunders, 1979. 941p. [ Links ]
Meek, W. J.; Keenan, M. & Theisen, H. J. The auricular blood supply in the dog; I. General auricular supply with special reference to the sinoauricular node. Am. Heart J., 4:591-9, 1929. [ Links ]
Moore, R.A. The coronary arteries of the dog. Am. Heart J., 5:743-9, 1930. [ Links ]
Nickel, R.; Scummer, A.; Seiferle, E. & Sack, W.O. The viscera of the domestic mammals. Berlin, Verlag Paul Perey, 1975. 399p. [ Links ]
Pianetto, M. B. The coronary arteries of the dog. Am. Heart J., 18:403-10, 1939. [ Links ]
Pina, J. A. E. & Pereira, A.T. Estudo morfológico das artérias coronárias no cão. Fol. Clin. Biol., 1(6-7):234-45, 1973. [ Links ]
Rozman, A. L.; Piera, J.; Michaels, L. & Stuckey, J. H. Injection studies of the arteria supply of the interventricular septum of the dog. Am. J. Cardiol., 10:447-52, 1962. [ Links ]
Schwarze, E. & Schröder, L. Compêndio de anatomia veterinaria. Zaragoza, Acribia, 1970, v.II. 247p. [ Links ]
Sisson, S. & Grossman Anatomia de los animales domésticos. 4.ed. Barcelona, Salvat, 1972. [ Links ]
Testut, L. Traité d'Anatomie humaine. 8.ed. Paris, Salvat, 1911. V2. [ Links ]
Correspondence to:
Profa. Dra. Marilena Longo Büll
Departamento de Anatomia
Instituto de Biociências
Universidade Estadual Paulista
Botucatu, SP, CEP 18618-000 ]]>
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Recibido : 06-12-2001
Aceptado: 02-03-2002
Departamento de Anatomia, IB, Universidade Estadual Paulista Botucatu / SP (UNESP), Brasil ]]>


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While they may have lost the latest battle in an interminable war, the Brange last night did not give ground. Because when they arrived, as you'd expect, the place went batsh-ts. He, as usual, was the most handsome son of a bitch in town. She… was a little waxy. But with an elegance last night that was missing from the SAGs and the rest. It was the earrings I think. And the stately way she swept up her hair. Not my favourite style but Angelina Jolie is a beauty for the ages.
And they were in a GREAT mood. She blew by Ryan Seacrest again although Brad did humour him for a few seconds, and then they dashed off together, at one point he held on to her clutch while she posed. She was quick always to return to his side though – we watched on the pool feed when they hadn't reached us yet and there was an almost girlish skip to her step whenever she reclaimed his hand. I'll be the sucker who believes they're deep in the soul.
I was on Twitter about this last night but for those of you who weren't – the best moment was when some super fan who was able to score a ticket tried to hug her.
The woman TRIED TO HUG ANGELINA JOLIE.
…the f-ck?
Crazy lady was hovering just at the steps. Brange finished at the photowall and were about to head up to the Kodak. Lunatic stuck out her arm, stopping Angelina from proceeding. Gushed in her face – I'm a big fan! Then as the Jolie moved to shake her hand, she pulled it in and tried to wrap the other around her shoulders.
Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh Oh God…
Are you covering your face? Because I'm wincing even as I'm reliving it.
Ew ew ew ew ew ew!!!!
Someone came in with a deflection. I missed that part because I had to look away. By the time I opened my eyes again, the Brange were walking away briskly while the deranged person looked like she was about to have a meltdown.
I hate people.
Anyway, a few minutes later, I had to rush to the press room from the balcony. In order to do so I had to cut across the Kodak entry. So I did. And they were waiting in line amid a swarm of people all pushing into the auditorium. And at that moment I saw them, right there, he was pulling a strand of hair out of her lipgloss. And then I think my mouth opened and I licked my lips.
Work called. Had to go. One glance back, she had her hand inside his jacket, his hand was on her ass.
Finally…the notable moment during the event – did you notice Brad was the last to stand for Kate Winslet? Angelina almost had to nudge him!
Brad Pitt when Kate Winslet wins
Me I thought it was gracious when Kate held out to her. I believed Angelina's expression in return. As for why Brad couldn't be bothered to get up…
He's Brad Pitt.
Again, he's not that pushover people keep saying he is. He didn't feel like it. He's as arrogant as they come. As sure-cocked as they come. He'd already stood up too many times over 4 hours. And it's not like his lady was the one who won.
Go on haters…let's hear it.
Photos from Gettyimages.com and Wenn.com and Flynetonline.com

subset: commoncrawl


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At the top of society's pecking order is the "noblesse oblige," a group of excellent natural leaders who belong in the ruling class. Then there are the "monsters," those who exploit the weak and cruelly do whatever it takes to get to the top. Lee Gook Chul (Kang Ji Hwan) was born into a life of privilege as the heir of a major hospital. But during the IMF crisis of the late 1990s, he loses everything and almost loses his life when those he trusted betray him. At his lowest point in life, Gook Chul realizes that he has been a monster to others in his earlier life. Gook Chul takes on a new identity as Kang Ki Tan and embarks on a mission of revenge against all those who have wronged him. Oh Soo Yeon (Sung Yuri), who works at the lawyer's office during the day and goes to the law school at night, gets caught up in Ki Tan's life as she tries to protect him from harm. Can Ki Tan return to his rightful place among the demons of the elite class? "Monster" is a 2016 South Korean drama series directed by Joo Sung Woo.
- Original title
- 몬스터
- Romanized title
- Monseuteo
- Also known as
- Tyrant,
- Volunteer Team
- The Rising Phoenix Team
- Broadcast Network
- Broadcast Period
- 03-28-2016 to 09-20-2016
- Rating
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Congratulations to Midway Village Museum for hosting a well-run special event called "World War I Days." I went on Saturday, April 12, and spoke with the soldiers. The re-enactment personnel were terrific. It was obvious that they had "done their homework." They could talk in detail about weapons, daily life, health conditions or trench warfare. They also could talk in broad overviews to others or to the kids with equal ease. They kept "in character" and made the event very special. I was so pleased to see such a big crowd. Families, teens, young adults — everyone had something to do and something to learn. The Great War began in 1914.
It was very appropriate for this special program to be here in 2014 as the world commemorates the war's 100th personnel and Midway Village for bringing this program to Rockford. The weather was perfect for roaming around the grounds and anniversary. It was a horrific war that changed the world forever.
Thank you encampment.
— Sue Grans, Rockford


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"SEAL Team 6" won't ever make it to ABC.
The Walt Disney Co., which owns the ABC network, has withdrawn its application for a merchandise-related trademark on the name of the elite special ops squad that took down Osama bin Laden, according to reports. But the Navy won the copyright battle by filing its own application.
"We are fully committed to protecting our trademark rights," Chief Navy spokesman Commander Danny Hernandez said Wednesday, reported The Wall Street Journal.
A Disney spokesman said the company withdrew the application "out of deference to the Navy." The Wall Street Journal reported that Navy officers privately expressed relief about the decision.
Just two days after Navy SEALS swarmed the al-Qaida leader's Pakistan hideout and killed him, Disney applied for exclusive right to the elite squad's moniker with merchandise and possibly a television show in mind. Attorneys say Disney's move was legal.
"You can't trademark flags or coats of arms," Los Angeles business and tax lawyer Greg Weisman told E!. "But pretty much anything else is up for grabs. The law says that the first person to use that trademark on a particular set of goods is deemed the owner. It's about being the first to use the goods."
For example, "G.I. Joe" was a general term to describe a soldier, but then a business-savvy somebody trademarked the phrase and began a franchise.
Selected Reading: Time, The Wall Street Journal, E! Online


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CARSON, Calif. – Two trialists joined the LA Galaxy at the beginning of the week and on Wednesday, head coach and general manager Bruce Arena revealed their names.
19-year-old Brazilian centerback Mathaus Ferreira de Sousa went 45 minutes for the Galaxy in their 7-2 preseason scrimmage victory over UCLA on Wednesday. Ferreira, who was last with Red Bull Brasil was stationed alongside LA's own Brazilian defender Leonardo for the entire half.
"It's easy to play with him because he's Brazilian where there is a different style," said Leonardo." He's played good. He's only had two or three days to adapt himself to [the U.S.] and he's done okay."
Arena also revealed the name of LA's other trialist, 21-year-old Brazilian midfielder Marcus Vinicius Gregorio de Souza also known as Marquinho. The midfielder recently spent time with Brazilian clubs Fluminense, Porto de Caruaru and Tupi
The Galaxy boss stated that the club was still early in the process of evaluating the two players.


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Man Australian music festivals are extreme.
Must watch...EDWARD-MANDELL-HOUSE....the father of our slave system!
great. I'll check it out!
@trintdaddy Yes, this is my main post about it: https://www.thehighersidechatsplus.com/forums/threads/tv-series-altered-carbon.7611/
@erikx OHHH it's a show on Netflix, right? Worth watching??
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The SMART Area, Part 4: Buses, and the Future
January 30, 2012 2 Comments
Over the last few days I've been posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan. It's such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needed more than just a single post. So far, we've covered land use and parking, and mobility, and this last post will cover buses the future of the site.
The hero of mobility in the Station Area Plan will not be SMART; it will be Golden Gate Transit. If a Sonoman wants to get to San Anselmo, she will likely go by bus. If a new resident in the Area Plan wants to go to San Francisco, he will go by bus. And if a Corte Maderan needs to get to Santa Rosa, she'll probably take a bus first. Yet, the bus system, as it stands, is widely lamented as inadequate, especially on weekends. How to improve long-range (beyond 2 miles) mobility for residents in and through the area, and how to accommodate the increased service in the study area, should certainly be part of the conversation.
The typical Marin bus route runs every 30 to 60 minutes and is far slower than driving an equivalent distance thanks to a few crazy loops, some too-compact stop densities, lack of signal priority, long stop layovers, and the general restrictions of running on surface streets in traffic. Although there is an effective and complicated transfer system, thanks to a 95% on-time rate, the bus as it currently stands is not a car-replacing transit system.
This bodes ill for transit-oriented development in the Plan Area, not to mention other towns that want to orient their ABAG zoning towards transit – essentially the whole of Marin except for Novato. Without an adequate framework, increased population will lead to more sprawl, meaning more traffic, more pollution, and less open space. We must make the bus work.
There's a debate in the activist community regarding how exactly to do that, but it comes down to a few priorities: improve the absolute quality of the bus service through frequency, improve the relative quality of the bus service by making cars a less attractive choice, and improve the efficiency of rider collection by putting residents and jobs near the stations. In the ideal this means bus rapid transit or just separated lanes, but in Marin's medium-term, such BRT lines on the old rail rights-of-way are probably politically infeasible, and auto mode share would likely remain too great to support the service. Express buses, however, make perfect sense.
Whenever I ride GGT, I hardly see any on-and-off boarding between major stations; people are going from center to center, and ridership is not evenly distributed along the route. GGT should acknowledge this and operate a high-frequency town-to-town express network. GGT's last semi-comprehensive system analysis showed that such express service, combined with developing a system of "green hub" transfer points, would benefit a huge number of riders. If marketed with SMART – a rubber-tire rail – GGT could have a success and draw riders out of the new developments along the SMART corridor.
To boost ridership more generally, GGT should mail every adult within a half-mile radius of the Transit Center a pre-loaded Clipper card with a year-long GGT unlimited ride pass, perhaps in conjunction with the proposed Zipcar membership. San Rafael should allow local businesses to cash-out of some parking requirements by purchasing annual transit passes for their employees. Boulder did something similar to these proposals and saw drive-alone rates drop from 56% to 36%, with the bus taking up the slack. Give people something of value, and they will respond.
The Area Plan makes no mention of improving overall bus capacity or promoting ridership, but it does make some recommendations on how to move the Bettini Transit Center to the SMART site. None of the proposals struck me as particularly attractive, as most of them involve transforming the blocks around the SMART station into rather pedestrian-unfriendly surface stations akin to the Bettini Transit Center today. Other proposals, such as putting bus bays along Heatherton and under the freeway are more attractive from a pedestrian perspective but offer limited capacity.
If San Rafael decides it needs a new parking garage west of 101, the bus terminal should be located to the ground level, giving riders a more weatherproofed facility and allowing the height above the terminal to be used effectively. Bettini's lack of developability is one of the major arguments in the Area Plan for its demolition, so the city should try to lump its desired but ugly infrastructure together. Using the example diagrams from the Area Plan, such a garage would likely provide between 10 and 20 bus bays, depending on the configuration and location of the garage.
The Future
SMART is coming to town, whether people want it or not, and with it will hopefully be a new neighborhood and a new swagger for San Rafael. The city has a chance to come to the forefront of urban policy in the North Bay through innovative (for Marin) land use practices like form-based zoning, parking minimum reform, and true transit-oriented development. Until now, these have simply been words in general plans and housing elements, but San Rafael may actually make it happen. The opportunities here should excite everyone who supports a more walkable, livable, and sustainable Marin.
That's not to say there aren't challenges. Parts of the city staff have a history of choosing car capacity over pedestrian-friendliness, and powerful organizations such as the San Rafael Neighborhood Association could still throw their weight against passage. Both impulses should be resisted by the Council. The opportunities are too great to let this plan slip by.
The Citizens Advisory Committee is meeting on February 2 at 7pm in San Rafael's Community Development Conference Room. The draft plan will go before the City Council some time in March. The Greater Marin will likely be back to its regularly scheduled programming Wednesday.


text: ASUS GeForce® GTX 780 gives new hope to hardcore gamers 3GB GDDR5 memory for the best gaming experiences in the highest resolutionsDynamic clock speed maximization based on game workload pushes performance to new levels with NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0 technologyGPU Tweak helps you modify clock speeds, voltages, fan performance and more, all via an intuitive interface Shop Modal header Pure Performance ASUS Exclusive Innovation GPU Tweak Real-time intuitive graphics tuning Shows detailed specs and actual card status with GPU-ZMonitoring widget provides real-time detailed multi-parameter infoAutomatically checks and updates drivers and BIOS versions Gigantic 3GB GDDR5 Memory On-board memory for the best gaming experience & the best resolution Graphics GPU Features Powered by GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA® GPU Boost 2.0 Technology for intelligent monitoring of clock speed, ensuring that the GPU runs at its peak and the game is at its highest frame rate possible. It offers new levels of customization, including GPU temperature target, overclocking, and unlocked voltage. NVIDIA® Adaptive V-Sync Get more than just faster frame rates. Get ultra-smooth gaming every time with NVIDIA® gaming innovation Adaptive Vertical Sync. This technology dynamically adjusts vsync to current frame rates for maximum playability. NVIDIA® PhysX™ Play games with advanced effects such as blazing explosions and lifelike characters with 10X faster switching between graphics and physics processing, enabling more complex effects to be rendered in real time. SLI Support Multi-GPU technology for extreme performance. NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ Transform hunreds of PC games into stereoscopic 3D and enjoy immersive full HD 3D gaming across three displays at an incredible 5760 x 1080 resolution. PCI Express 3.0 Delivers double the bandwidth per lane of PCIe 2.0 for faster GPU-CPU communication. DirectX® 11 DirectX® 11 GPU-accelerated tessellation allows more detailed geometry to be packed into a scene, allowing characters to be rendered with cinema-quality detail. Microsoft Windows 8 compatible Gives you access to advanced computing experiences with the latest operating system so you get more done with your PC. I/O Ports Highlight 1x Native Dual-link DVI-I 1x Native Dual-link DVI-D 1x Native HDMI 1x Native DisplayPort


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While the U.S. men's volleyball team hasn't yet secured a trip to London, no one is panicking.
The men, who have gone to seven straight Olympics, are confident as the defending gold medal winners going into their upcoming continental qualification tournament. But the team has added reason for the self-assurance: The event is being played on home soil.
Eight teams will vie for a spot in the London Games at the NORCECA Olympic qualification tournament, starting Monday at the Walter Pyramid in Long Beach, Calif. It is the first time that the United States has hosted the event.
"I really hope the fans come out in big numbers, and are super patriotic, excited and loud. Really make it a home court," coach Alan Knipe said. "Because other than the World League a couple of weekends a year, we rarely get to play in the United States. We play the majority of our schedule on foreign soil. So the opportunity to play here - obviously with a lot riding on the tournament - is a wonderful thing."
The men missed out on an early chance to punch a ticket to London, finishing off the podium at the 2011 World Cup. After that event many of the players scattered across the globe to play for professional teams.
The group reassembled last week for training at the American Sports Centers in Anaheim, Calif. Over the weekend, the team hosted a pair of exhibition matches against Argentina, winning both.
"Training is by far the most important thing for this team right now, just getting back on the same page with each other," Knipe said. "But the competition mode is something that's very difficult to replicate in a gym, so these exhibitions are obviously valuable."
The other teams competing in Long Beach are Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Puerto Rico, Trinidad & Tobago, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.
Cuba is currently ranked fifth in the FIVB world rankings, a spot ahead of the U.S. men.
"This is the first time this event is being held so close to the Olympics, or so late in the year," USA Volleyball CEO Doug Beal said. "So that puts a little more tension in the event, a little more anxiety in the air for the teams."
The U.S. men have qualified for the past three Olympics at the NORCECA qualification tournament. In 1996, the men won an automatic bid to the Atlanta Games as the host country.
The men were undefeated at the Beijing Olympics, upsetting top-ranked Brazil in the final match. Coach Hugh McCutcheon guided the team despite personal tragedy: His father-in-law was murdered at a Chinese landmark a day before the opening ceremonies.
After the Olympics, McCutcheon shifted over to the U.S. women's national team, which won the silver medal in Beijing. The women are currently ranked No. 1 in the world and have already secured a spot in London.
Knipe took leave from his job as the head coach at Long Beach State to take over the national team for the 2009-2012 Olympic quadrennial.
Twelve men's teams will play in the London Olympics. Great Britain has already earned a berth as host, while Russia, Poland and Brazil qualified with the top finishes in last year's FIVB World Cup.
The U.S. men have won three Olympic volleyball gold medals, at the Los Angeles Games in 1984, the Seoul Games in 1988 and in Beijing.
If the team does not qualify, they'll likely have another chance. The FIVB, the international governing body for volleyball, will hold three four-team qualification tournaments in Japan, Italy and Germany in June. Invitations to the events are based on world ranking.
Copyright 2012 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited.


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Food & Friends was Jack's passion. Thank you for helping us help them in his memory ~ for 22 years now!!
This Thanksgiving, serve a holiday pie that will warm your heart and help your neighbors. Each pie you purchase will provide breakfast, lunch and dinner for a child or adult battling HIV/AIDS, cancer or another critical illness. Six days a week, Food & Friends provides nutritious meals to thousands of individuals in our community but they can't do it without your support! Your contribution will make a direct impact in the lives of their clients, many of whom have no where else to turn. You can make their lives better by not only providing vital nutrition but hope and comfort in their time of need.
Tammy Bish
Amount Sold: 105 pies
Amount Raised: $3,863 raised
Team Goal
Pies Sold


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Border of Narcissus and Echo. Harbiye, third century AD, inv. 938. The feet of Echo can just be seen.From the Enc. Britt.: Echo (was) a mountain nymph, or oread. Ovid's Metamorphoses relates that Echo offended the goddess Hera by keeping her in conversation, thus preventing her from spying on one of Zeus' amours. To punish Echo, Hera deprived her of speech, except for the ability to repeat the last words of another. Echo's hopeless love for Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, made her fade away until all that was left of her was her voice.
For any use: see my Profile. NOTE: Many of my pictures are in sub-galleries (some within another, their name is in bold print)!


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Lacoste Mens Blue S/S L1212 Polo
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Please alert me via email when this product is back in stock.
Lacoste L1212 Plain Polo Shirt in Marine (166). Lacoste's iconic L1212 plain polo shirt has been a staple of the brand's ranges for decades. A simple, cotton polo shirt featuring an embroidered crocodile logo to the left of the chest, elasticated sleeve cuffs and two button closure placket.
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We aim to dispatch all orders placed before 15:30 on the same day, Monday – Friday. Orders placed after 15:30 or placed at weekends/bank holidays will be dispatched on the next working day (working days are classed as Mon-Fri).
Please see the Delivery page for further information.
Masdings offer 7 delivery options across the UK, Europe and Rest of the world, for more details check the delivery page.
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Hello! I apologize for taking a little too long to post something! I have been doing certain things (other side projects) and following the progress of my country's election [Kenya]. I hope everything is going good for you.
Today(starting Wednesday 3/6/2013), I am going to give my book away for FREE on Amazon. I have been waiting for this for a while now and I figured I should do it now and then extend my reach to other platforms like smashwords and Barnes and Noble. So here is what I am going to do:
If you own a kindle tablet, an android tablet, a smart phone, or any other type of gadget that accepts applications, then you are all set. Oh, wait, I have to also mention the fact that you need an appetite for true stories (like the nearly 10,000 others who have read the book already). I normally tell people to read the reviews first: like these two I grabbed from Amazon:
You can also read more reviews by visiting my Amazon page before making your decision.
When you are done reading the reviews, you can grab your copy by downloading it to your device (including your computer if you don't own the above mentioned tablets). Here is the snapshot of the book:
You can download the book by clicking on the above image or using this download link:
Download My Life Sentences – A True Story for Free Today
If you run into problems while trying to do this, please notify me and I will be more than happy to help you. If you would like to share a link on Facebook or any other social media that you use, please know that I will truly appreciate. That is all am going to say for today. I hope you find this book inspiring.
Thank you!


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text: Luk Chai is two months old today! Luk Chai spent the afternoon in the dust bath with the girls as they coated themselves in dirt. He's been mimicking mum and the aunts, trying to spray dirt on himself with his trunk. He wasn't very successful, but he got plastered in dirt anyway. He stood under their bellies and the extra soil fell on to his back. We've noticed that he's learnt one of mum's tricks. Thong Dee loves trying to steal treats from our food pouches. Thong Dee taps the pouch with her trunk and tries to reach in when she thinks we're not looking. Luk Chai has been watching mum and although he doesn't even eat veggies yet he's taken on one of mum's endearing characteristics. Luk Chai approaches quietly and he's caught me quite unaware a few times! You don't know he's right next to you until you feel his little trunk poking about in your pouch. He hasn't managed to steal any of the adults' treats yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time till the young calf perfects his technique.


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I started this great book by Mike Hayes before I went to bed Thursday night at the conference. I finished it on the plane home the next day.
Mike is well known in the blogosphere as the co-founder of Busted Halo. He has a great blog, Googling God. Now, like me, he's a campus minister. He delivered an excellent presentation at his breakout session. He's clearly a guy well at home with himself and in his role in the Church. That confidence provides the spirit of this book.
Mike brings an Ignatian education and sensibility to a straight-forward approach to uncovering just what we should be doing with this life God has given us. He peppers six chapters with personal stories of his own work history, and how he was led from a career in broadcasting, to the internet, and from there, to campus ministry and retreats.
If you know a young adult searching for direction along the lines of work, I can't think of a better book. It will appeal to those who are deeply religious, but will also impact a person not so deeply churchy.


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I prepared for my first-ever trip to Japan, this summer, almost entirely by immersing myself in the work of Haruki Murakami. This turned out to be a horrible idea. Under the influence of Murakami, I arrived in Tokyo expecting Barcelona or Paris or Berlin — a cosmopolitan world capital whose straight-talking citizens were fluent not only in English but also in all the nooks and crannies of Western culture: jazz, theater, literature, sitcoms, film noir, opera, rock 'n' roll. But this, as really anyone else in the world could have told you, is not what Japan is like at all. Japan — real, actual, visitable Japan — turned out to be intensely, inflexibly, unapologetically Japanese.
This lesson hit me, appropriately, underground. On my first morning in Tokyo, on the way to Murakami's office, I descended into the subway with total confidence, wearing a freshly ironed shirt — and then immediately became terribly lost and could find no English speakers to help me, and eventually (having missed trains and bought lavishly expensive wrong tickets and gestured furiously at terrified commuters) I ended up surfacing somewhere in the middle of the city, already extremely late for my interview, and then proceeded to wander aimlessly, desperately, in every wrong direction at once (there are few street signs, it turns out, in Tokyo) until finally Murakami's assistant Yuki had to come and find me, sitting on a bench in front of a honeycombed-glass pyramid that looked, in my time of despair, like the sinister temple of some death-cult of total efficiency.
And so I was baptized by Tokyo's underground. I had always assumed — naively, Americanly — that Murakami was a faithful representative of modern Japanese culture, at least in his more realist moods. It became clear to me down there, however, that he is different from the writer I thought he was, and Japan is a different place — and the relationship between the two is far more complicated than I ever could have guessed from the safe distance of translation.
One protagonist of Murakami's new novel, "1Q84," is tormented by his first memory to such an extent that he makes a point of asking everyone he meets about their own. When I met Murakami, finally, in his Tokyo office, I made a point of asking him what his own first memory was. When he was 3, he told me, he managed somehow to walk out the front door of his house all by himself. He tottered across the road, then fell into a creek. The water swept him downstream toward a dark and terrible tunnel. Just as he was about to enter it, however, his mother reached down and saved him. "I remember it very clearly," he said. "The coldness of the water and the darkness of the tunnel — the shape of that darkness. It's scary. I think that's why I'm attracted to darkness." As Murakami described this memory, I felt a strange internal joggling that I couldn't quite place — it felt like déjà vu crossed with the spiritual equivalent of having to sneeze. It struck me that I had heard this memory before, or, eerily, that I was somehow remembering the memory myself, firsthand. Only much later did I realize that I was, indeed, remembering the memory: Murakami had transferred it to one of his very minor characters near the beginning of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle."
That first visit to Murakami took place on a muggy midmorning, midweek, in the middle of an impossibly difficult summer for Japan — a summer spent trying to deal, here in reality, with the aftermath of a seemingly unreal disaster. The tsunami hit the northern coast four months before, killing 20,000 people, destroying entire towns, causing a partial nuclear meltdown and plunging the country into a handful of simultaneous crises: energy, public health, media, politics. (When the prime minister stepped down recently, it made him the fifth in five years to do so.) I had come to speak with Murakami, Japan's leading novelist, about the translation into English (and also French, Thai, Spanish, Hebrew, Latvian, Turkish, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Czech, Russian and Catalan) of his massive "1Q84" — a book that has already sold millions of copies across Asia and generated serious Nobel Prize chatter in most of the languages in which it is not yet even available. At age 62, three decades into his career, Murakami has established himself as the unofficial laureate of Japan — arguably its chief imaginative ambassador, in any medium, to the world: the primary source, for many millions of readers, of the texture and shape of his native country.
This, no doubt, comes as an enormous surprise to everyone involved.
Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America's postwar occupation. "It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment," the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, "more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one." Substitute "fiction" for "moment" in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami's work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience.
Murakami grew up, mostly, in the suburbs surrounding Kobe, an international port defined by the din of many languages. As a teenager, he immersed himself in American culture, especially hard-boiled detective novels and jazz. He internalized their attitude of cool rebellion, and in his early 20s, instead of joining the ranks of a large corporation, Murakami grew out his hair and his beard, married against his parents' wishes, took out a loan and opened a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. He spent nearly 10 years absorbed in the day-to-day operations of the club: sweeping up, listening to music, making sandwiches and mixing drinks deep into the night.
His career as a writer began in classic Murakami style: out of nowhere, in the most ordinary possible setting, a mystical truth suddenly descended upon him and changed his life forever. Murakami, age 29, was sitting in the outfield at his local baseball stadium, drinking a beer, when a batter — an American transplant named Dave Hilton — hit a double. It was a normal-enough play, but as the ball flew through the air, an epiphany struck Murakami. He realized, suddenly, that he could write a novel. He had never felt a serious desire to do so before, but now it was overwhelming. And so he did: after the game, he went to a bookstore, bought a pen and some paper and over the next couple of months produced "Hear the Wind Sing," a slim, elliptical tale of a nameless 21-year-old narrator, his friend called the Rat and a four-fingered woman. Nothing much happens, but the Murakami voice is there from the start: a strange broth of ennui and exoticism. In just 130 pages, the book manages to reference a thorough cross-section of Western culture: "Lassie," "The Mickey Mouse Club," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "California Girls," Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, the French director Roger Vadim, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley, the cartoon bird Woodstock, Sam Peckinpah and Peter, Paul and Mary. That's just a partial list, and the book contains (at least in its English translation) not a single reference to a work of Japanese art in any medium. This tendency in Murakami's work rankles some Japanese critics to this day.
Murakami submitted "Hear the Wind Sing" for a prestigious new writers' prize and won. After another year and another novel — this one featuring a possibly sentient pinball machine — Murakami sold his jazz club in order to devote himself, full time, to writing.
"Full time," for Murakami, means something different from what it does for most people. For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — "but voluntary confinement, happy confinement."
"Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life," he said. "If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I'm not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don't get bored. I'm kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I'm always hot."
That daily boiling has produced, over time, one of the world's most distinctive bodies of work: three decades of addictive weirdness that falls into an oddly fascinating hole between genres (sci-fi, fantasy, realist, hard-boiled) and cultures (Japan, America), a hole that no writer has ever explored before, or at least nowhere near this deep. Over the years, Murakami's novels have tended to grow longer and more serious — the sitcom references have given way, for the most part, to symphonies — and now, after a particularly furious and sustained boil, he has produced his longest, strangest, most serious book yet.
Murakami speaks excellent English in a slow, deep voice. He dislikes, he told me, speaking through a translator. His accent is strong — inflections would rise dramatically or drop off suddenly just when I was expecting them to hold steady — and yet only rarely did we have trouble understanding each other. Certain colloquialisms ("I guess"; "like that") cycled in and out of his speech in slightly odd positions. I got the sense that he enjoyed being out of his linguistic element: there's a touch of improvisational fun in his English. We sat at a table in his office in Tokyo, the headquarters of what he refers to half-jokingly as Murakami Industries. A small staff buzzed around, shoelessly, in the other rooms. Murakami wore blue shorts and a short-sleeve button-up shirt that appeared to have been — like many of his characters' shirts — recently ironed. (He loves ironing.) He was barefoot. He drank black coffee out of a mug featuring the Penguin cover of Raymond Chandler's "Big Sleep" — one of his first literary loves, and a novel he is currently translating into Japanese.
As we began to talk, I set my advance copy of "1Q84" on the table between us. Murakami seemed genuinely alarmed. The book is 932 pages long and nearly a foot tall — the size of an extremely serious piece of legislation.
"It's so big," Murakami said. "It's like a telephone directory."
This, apparently, was Murakami's first look at the American version of the book, which, as tends to happen in such cultural exchanges, has been slightly denatured. In Japan, "1Q84" came out in three separate volumes over two years. (Murakami originally ended the novel after Book 2 and then decided, a year later, to add several hundred more pages.) In America, it has been supersized into a single-volume monolith and positioned as the literary event of the fall. You can watch a fancy book trailer for it on YouTube, and some bookstores are planning to stay open until midnight on its release date, Oct. 25. Knopf was in such a hurry to get the book into English that they split the job between two translators, each of whom worked on separate parts.
I asked Murakami if he intended to write such a big book. He said no: that if he'd known how long it would turn out to be, he might not have started at all. He tends to begin a piece of fiction with only a title or an opening image (in this case he had both) and then just sits at his desk, morning after morning, improvising until it's done. "1Q84," he said, held him prisoner for three years.
This giant book, however, grew from the tiniest of seeds. According to Murakami, "1Q84" is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories, "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning," which (in its English version) is five pages long. "Basically, it's the same," he told me. "A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It's a simple story. I just made it long."
"1Q84" is not, actually, a simple story. Its plot may not even be fully summarizable — at least not in the space of a magazine article, written in human language, on this astral plane. It begins at a dead stop: a young woman named Aomame (it means "green peas") is stuck in a taxi, in a traffic jam, on one of the elevated highways that circle the outskirts of Tokyo. A song comes over the taxi's radio: a classical piece called the "Sinfonietta," by the Czechoslovakian composer Leos Janacek — "probably not the ideal music," Murakami writes, "to hear in a taxi caught in traffic." And yet it resonates with her on some mysterious level. As the "Sinfonietta" plays and the taxi idles, the driver finally suggests to Aomame an unusual escape route. The elevated highways, he tells her, are studded with emergency pullouts; in fact, there happens to be one just ahead. These pullouts, he says, have secret stairways to the street that most people aren't aware of. If she is truly desperate she could probably manage to climb down one of these. As Aomame considers this, the driver suddenly issues a very Murakami warning. "Please remember," he says, "things are not what they seem." If she goes down, he warns, her world might suddenly change forever.
She does, and it does. The world Aomame descends into has a subtly different history, and there are also — less subtly — two moons. (The appointment she's late for, by the way, turns out to be an assassination.) There is also a tribe of magical beings called the Little People who emerge, one evening, from the mouth of a dead, blind goat (long story), expand themselves from the size of a tadpole to the size of a prairie dog and then, while chanting "ho ho" in unison, start plucking white translucent threads out of the air in order to weave a big peanut-shaped orb called an "air chrysalis." This is pretty much the baseline of craziness in "1Q84." About halfway through, the book launches itself to such rarefied supernatural heights (a levitating clock, mystical sex-paralysis) that I found myself drawing exclamation points all over the margins.
For decades now, Murakami has been talking about working himself up to write what he calls a "comprehensive novel" — something on the scale of "The Brothers Karamazov," one of his artistic touchstones. (He has read the book four times.) This seems to be what he has attempted with "1Q84": a grand, third-person, all-encompassing meganovel. It is a book full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it — a book that, even despite its occasional awkwardness (or maybe even because of that awkwardness), makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange folds a single human brain can hold.
I told Murakami that I was surprised to discover, after so many surprising books, that he managed to surprise me again. As usual, he took no credit, claiming to be just a boring old vessel for his imagination.
"The Little People came suddenly," he said. "I don't know who they are. I don't know what it means. I was a prisoner of the story. I had no choice. They came, and I described it. That is my work."
I asked Murakami, whose work is so often dreamlike, if he himself has vivid dreams. He said he could never remember them — he wakes up and there's just nothing. The only dream he remembers from the last couple of years, he said, is a recurring nightmare that sounds a lot like a Haruki Murakami story. In the dream, a shadowy, unknown figure is cooking him what he calls "weird food": snake-meat tempura, caterpillar pie and (an instant classic of Japanese dream-cuisine) rice with tiny pandas in it. He doesn't want to eat it, but in the dream world he feels compelled to. He wakes up just before he takes a bite.
On our second day together, Murakami and I climbed into the backseat of his car and took a ride to his seaside home. One of his assistants, a stylish woman slightly younger than Aomame, drove us over Tokyo on the actual elevated highway from which Aomame makes her fateful descent in "1Q84." The car stereo was playing Bruce Springsteen's version of "Old Dan Tucker," a classic piece of darkly surrealist Americana. ("Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man/Washed his face in a frying pan/Combed his hair with a wagon wheel/And died with a toothache in his heel.")
As we drove, Murakami pointed out the emergency pullouts he had in mind when he wrote that opening scene. (He was stuck here in traffic, he said, just like Aomame, when the idea struck him.) Then he undertook an existentially complicated task: he tried to pinpoint, very precisely, on the actual highway, the spot where the fictional Aomame would have climbed down into a new world. "She was going from Yoga to Shibuya," he said, looking out the car window. "So it was probably right here." Then he turned to me and added, as if to remind us both: "But it's not real." Still, he looked back through the window and continued as if he were describing something that had actually happened. "Yes," he said, pointing. "This is where she went down." We were passing a building called the Carrot Tower, not far from a skyscraper that looked as if it had giant screws sticking into it. Then Murakami turned back to me and added, as if the thought had just occurred to him again: "But it's not real."
Murakami's fiction has a special way of leaking into reality. During my five days in Japan, I found that I was less comfortable in actual Tokyo than I was in Murakami's Tokyo — the real city filtered through the imaginative lens of his books. I spent as much time in that world as possible. I went to a baseball game at Jingu Stadium — the site of Murakami's epiphany — and stood high up in the frenzy of the bleachers, paying special attention every time someone hit a double. (The closest I got to my own epiphany was when I shot an edamame bean straight down my throat and almost choked.) I went for a long run on Murakami's favorite Tokyo running route, the Jingu-Gaien, while listening to his favorite running music, the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and Eric Clapton's 2001 album "Reptile." My hotel was near Shinjuku Station, the transportation hub around which "1Q84" pivots, and I drank coffee and ate curry at its characters' favorite meeting place, the Nakamuraya cafe. I went to a Denny's at midnight — the scene of the opening of Murakami's novel "After Dark" — and eavesdropped on Tokyoites over French toast and bubble tea. I became hyperaware, as I wandered around, of the things Murakami novels are hyperaware of: incidental music, ascents and descents, the shapes of people's ears.
In doing all of this I was joining a long line of Murakami pilgrims. People have published cookbooks based on the meals described in his novels and assembled endless online playlists of the music his characters listen to. Murakami told me, with obvious delight, that a company in Korea has organized "Kafka on the Shore" tour groups in Western Japan, and that his Polish translator is putting together a "1Q84"-themed travel guide to Tokyo.
Sometimes the tourism even crosses metaphysical boundaries. Murakami often hears from readers who have "discovered" his inventions in the real world: a restaurant or a shop that he thought he made up, they report, actually exists in Tokyo. In Sapporo, there are now apparently multiple Dolphin Hotels — an establishment Murakami invented in "A Wild Sheep Chase." After publishing "1Q84," Murakami received a letter from a family with the surname "Aomame," a name so improbable (remember: "green peas") he thought he invented it. He sent them a signed copy of the book. The kicker is that all of this — fiction leaking into reality, reality leaking into fiction — is what most of Murakami's fiction (including, especially, "1Q84") is all about. He is always shuttling us back and forth between worlds.
This calls to mind the act of translation — shuttling from one world to another — which is in many ways the key to understanding Murakami's work. He has consistently denied being influenced by Japanese writers; he even spoke, early in his career, about escaping "the curse of Japanese." Instead, he formed his literary sensibilities as a teenager by obsessively reading Western novelists: the classic Europeans (Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Dickens) but especially a cluster of 20th-century Americans whom he has read over and over throughout his life — Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut. When Murakami sat down to write his first novel, he struggled until he came up with an unorthodox solution: he wrote the book's opening in English, then translated it back into Japanese. This, he says, is how he found his voice. Murakami's longstanding translator, Jay Rubin, told me that a distinctive feature of Murakami's Japanese is that it often reads, in the original, as if it has been translated from English.
You could even say that translation is the organizing principle of Murakami's work: that his stories are not only translated but about translation. The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, a conversation with a Sheep Man) — watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. A Murakami character is always, in a sense, translating between radically different worlds: mundane and bizarre, natural and supernatural, country and city, male and female, overground and underground. His entire oeuvre, in other words, is the act of translation dramatized.
Back in the backseat of Murakami's car, we left Tokyo and entered its exurbs. We passed numerous corporate headquarters, as well as a love hotel shaped like a giant boat. After an hour or so, the landscape thickened and rose, and we arrived at Murakami's house, a nice but ordinary-looking two-story structure in a leafy, hilly neighborhood halfway between the mountains and the sea.
I exchanged my shoes for slippers, and Murakami took me upstairs to his office — the voluntary cell in which he wrote most of "1Q84." This is also, not coincidentally, the home of his vast record collection. (He guesses that he has around 10,000 but says he's too scared to count.) The office's two long walls were covered from floor to ceiling with albums, all neatly shelved in plastic sleeves. Presiding over the end of the room, under a high bank of windows that looked out onto the mountains, were two huge stereo speakers. The room's other shelves held mementos of Murakami's life and work: a mug featuring Johnnie Walker, the whisky icon whom he re-imagined as a murderous villain in "Kafka on the Shore"; a photo of himself looking miserable while finishing his fastest marathon ever (1991, New York City, 3:31:27). On the walls were a photo of Raymond Carver, a poster of Glenn Gould and some small paintings of important jazz figures, including Murakami's favorite musician of all time, the tenor saxophonist Stan Getz.
I asked if we could listen to a record, and Murakami put on Janacek's "Sinfonietta," the song that kicks off, and then periodically haunts, the narrative of "1Q84." It is, as the book suggests, truly the worst possible music for a traffic jam: busy, upbeat, dramatic — like five normal songs fighting for supremacy inside an empty paint can. This makes it the perfect theme for the frantic, lumpy, violent adventure of "1Q84." Shouting over the music, Murakami told me that he chose the "Sinfonietta" precisely for its weirdness. "Just once I heard that music in a concert hall," he said. "There were 15 trumpeters behind the orchestra. Strange. Very strange. . . . And that weirdness fits very well in this book. I cannot imagine what other kind of music is fitting so well in this story." He said he listened to the song, over and over, as he wrote the opening scene. "I chose the 'Sinfonietta' because that is not a popular music at all. But after I published this book, the music became popular in this country. . . . Mr. Seiji Ozawa thanked me. His record has sold well."
When the "Sinfonietta" ended, I asked him if he could remember the first record he ever bought. He stood up, rummaged around one of his shelves and produced, for my inspection, "The Many Sides of Gene Pitney." Its cover featured a glamour shot of Pitney, an early-'60s American crooner, wearing a spotted ascot and a lush red jacket. His hair looked like a cresting wave frozen into shape. Murakami said he bought the record in Kobe when he was 13. (This was a replacement copy; he wore the original out decades ago.) He dropped the needle and played Pitney's first big hit, "Town Without Pity," a dramatic, horn-filled vamp in which Pitney voices a young lover crooning an apocalyptic cry for help: "The young have problems, many problems/We need an understanding heart/Why don't they help us, try to help us/Before this clay and granite planet falls apart?"
Murakami lifted the needle as soon as it was over. "A silly song," he said.
The title of "1Q84" is a joke: an Orwell reference that hinges on a multilingual pun. (In Japanese, the number 9 is pronounced like the English letter Q.)
I asked Murakami if he reread "1984" while writing "1Q84." He said he did, and it was boring. (Not that this is necessarily bad; at one point I asked him why he liked baseball. "Because it's boring," he said.)
"Most near-future fictions are boring," he told me. "It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy. I like what Cormac McCarthy wrote, 'The Road' — it's very well written. . . . But still it's boring. It's dark, and the people are eating people. . . . George Orwell's '1984' is near-future fiction, but this is near-past fiction," he said of "1Q84." "We are looking at the same year from the opposite side. If it's near past, it's not boring."
I asked him if he felt any kinship with Orwell.
"I guess we have a common feeling against the system," Murakami said. "George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer. . . . I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody."
And yet Murakami has, uncharacteristically, stated his political messages very loudly over the last couple of years. In 2009, he made a controversial visit to Israel to accept the prestigious Jerusalem Prize and used the occasion to speak out about Israel and Palestine. This summer, he used an awards ceremony in Barcelona as a platform to criticize Japan's nuclear industry. He called Fukushima Daiichi the second nuclear disaster in the history of Japan, but the first that was entirely self-inflicted.
When I asked him about his Barcelona speech, he modified his percentages slightly.
"I am 99 percent a fiction writer and 1 percent a citizen," he said. "As a citizen I have things to say, and when I have to do it, I do it clearly. At that point, nobody said no against nuclear-power plants. So I think I should do it. It's my responsibility." He said that the response to his speech, in Japan, was mostly positive — that people hoped, as he did, that the horror of the tsunami could be a catalyst for reform. "I think many Japanese people think this is a turning point for our country," he said. "It was a nightmare, but still it's a good chance to change. After 1945, we have been working so hard and getting rich. But that kind of thing doesn't continue anymore. We have to change our values. We have to think about how we can get happy. It's not about money. It's not about efficiency. It's about discipline and purpose. What I wanted to say is what I've been saying since 1968: we have to change the system. I think this is a time when we have to be idealistic again."
I asked him what that idealism looked like, if he perhaps saw the United States as a model.
"I don't think people think of America as a model anymore," he said. "We don't have any model at this moment. We have to establish the new model."
The defining disasters of modern Japan — the subway sarin-gas attack, the Kobe earthquake, the recent tsunami — are, to an amazing extent, Murakami disasters: spasms of underground violence, deep unseen trauma that manifests itself as massive destruction to daily life on the surface. He is notoriously obsessed with metaphors of depth: characters climbing down empty wells to enter secret worlds or encountering dark creatures underneath Tokyo's subway tunnels. (He once told an interviewer that he had to stop himself from using well imagery, after his eighth novel, because the frequency of it was starting to embarrass him.) He imagines his own creativity in terms of depth as well. Every morning at his desk, during his trance of total focus, Murakami becomes a Murakami character: an ordinary man who spelunks the caverns of his creative unconscious and faithfully reports what he finds.
"I live in Tokyo," he told me, "a kind of civilized world — like New York or Los Angeles or London or Paris. If you want to find a magical situation, magical things, you have to go deep inside yourself. So that is what I do. People say it's magic realism — but in the depths of my soul, it's just realism. Not magical. While I'm writing, it's very natural, very logical, very realistic and reasonable."
Murakami insists that, when he's not writing, he is an absolutely ordinary man — his creativity, he says, is a "black box" to which he has no conscious access. He tends to shy away from the media and is always surprised when a reader wants to shake his hand on the street. He says he much prefers to listen to other people talk — and indeed, he is known as a kind of Studs Terkel in Japan. After the 1995 sarin-gas attacks, Murakami spent a year interviewing 65 victims and perpetrators; he published the results in an enormous two-volume book, which was translated into English, heavily abridged, as "Underground."
At the end of our time together, Murakami took me for a run. ("Most of what I know about writing," he has written, "I've learned through running every day.") His running style is an extension of his personality: easy, steady, matter of fact. After a minute or two, after we found our mutual stride, Murakami asked if I would like to start with something he referred to only as the Hill. The way he said it sounded like a challenge, a warning. Soon I understood his tone, because we were suddenly climbing it, the Hill — not exactly running anymore but stumbling in place at a serious tilt, the earth an angled treadmill underneath us. As we inched our way toward the end of the road, I turned to Murakami and said, "That was a big hill." At which point he gestured to indicate that we had only reached the first of many switchbacks. After awhile, as our breathing turned more and more ragged, I started to wonder, pessimistically, if the switchbacks would never end, if we had entered some Murakami world of endless elevation: ascent, ascent, ascent. But then, finally, we reached the top. We could see the sea far below us: the vast secret water world, fully mapped but uninhabitable, stretching between Japan and America. Its surface looked calm, from where we stood, that day.
And then we started running down. Murakami led me through his village, past the surf shop on the main street, past a row of fishermen's houses (he pointed out a traditional "fishermen's shrine" in one of the yards). For a while the air was moist and salty as we ran parallel to the beach. We talked about John Irving, with whom Murakami once went jogging in Central Park as a young, unknown translator. We talked about cicadas: how strange it would be to live for so many years underground only to emerge, screaming, for a couple of fatal months up in the trees. Mainly I remember the steady rhythm of Murakami's feet.
Back at the house, after our run, I showered and changed in Murakami's guest bathroom. As I waited for him to come back downstairs, I stood in the breeze of the dining-room air-conditioner and looked out a picture window that framed a little backyard garden of herbs and small trees.
After a few minutes, a strange creature fluttered into my view of the garden. At first it seemed like some kind of bird — a strange hairy hummingbird, maybe, based on the way it was hovering. But then it started to look more like two birds stuck together: it wobbled more than it flew, and it had all kinds of flaps and extra parts hanging off it. I decided, in the end, that it was a big, black butterfly, the strangest butterfly I had ever seen. It floated there, wiggling like an alien fish, just long enough for me to be confused — to try to resolve it, never quite successfully, into some familiar category of thing. And then it flew away, wiggling, off down the mountain toward the ocean, retracing, roughly, the route Murakami and I had taken on our run.
Moments after the butterfly left, Murakami came down the stairs and sat, quietly, at his dining-room table. I told him I had just seen the weirdest butterfly I had ever seen in my entire life. He took a drink from his plastic water bottle, then looked up at me. "There are many butterflies in Japan," he said. "It is not strange to see a butterfly."


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ROCKFORD — Rockford University, 5050 E. State St., will host a youth basketball camp from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 14-17.
The camp is for boys and girls currently in grades third through eighth and will focus on improving fundamentals including shooting, dribbling and passing.
Cost: $100 per person. For information: goregents.com.


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Vista, CA (March 6, 2013) Leica Biosystems, which through its acquisition of Aperio became the leading provider of digital pathology systems, announced today that Chinese physicians have access to U.S. healthcare organizations for real-time, expert review of pathology cases through the first scalable, secure medical cloud network through its strategic collaboration with Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences.
The U.S. institutions providing pathology services include: The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Dianon/Lab Corp. and ProPath. According to Krista Crews, executive director of ProPath, "Through the use of amazingly innovative technologies, pathology services can be provided efficiently and rapidly to support the needs in China."
"We are pleased to now have access to additional pathology resources," said Hongbo Li, M.D., a GI pathologist and co-founder of Sinopath Diagnostics. Located in the Beijing International Medical Center, Sinopath Diagnostics provides services for routine anatomic pathology diagnoses, pathology consultation, tele-IHC, companion diagnostics and genetic testing. "By improving communication among our colleagues, we can enhance the quality of care we provide for our patients," said Li.
"Demand for pathology services in China is growing rapidly and we need easier access to experts both inside and outside of China to keep up with the demand," said Shiang Huang, M.D., founder and CEO of Kindstar Globalgene Technology. Kindstar provides laboratory services to over 3,300 Chinese hospitals for advanced diagnostics in oncology and other medical specialties.
"Connecting China and the U.S. through our collaboration with Dell begins to meet our goal to address the regional and global imbalances of pathology expertise available for patient care by enabling access to pathologists, regardless of location," said Matthias Weber, M.D., president of Leica Biosystems.
The cloud-based solution, powered by Dell's Unified Clinical Archive, is a global, secure and scalable IT platform. This provides the foundation of best practices to optimize access to large pathology images so physicians can quickly and easily review and collaborate to expedite patient results and treatment decisions.
"Dell is excited to work with Leica Biosystems on this initiative and to facilitate the sharing of whole slide pathology images via the cloud," said August Calhoun, Ph.D., vice president and general manager of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences. "This is a prime example of how a hybrid cloud solution with application-neutral data management capabilities can break down traditional information silos and allow healthcare organizations to securely manage, store and share data to advance patient care even across great distances."
About Leica Biosystems
Leica Biosystems is a global leader in laboratory workflow solutions for anatomic pathology, striving to advance cancer diagnostics to improve patients' lives. Leica Biosystems provides a comprehensive product range for each step in the pathology process, from sample preparation and staining to imaging and reporting. Recognizing there is a shortage of Pathology expertise worldwide, as well as increasing sub specialization, Leica Biosystems expanded its capability in pathology imaging with Aperio ePathology Solutions enabling greater access for Pathologists through market leading whole slide scanners, NETWORK solutions that enables remote, real-time viewing and easy distribution of images for collaboration, and PRECISION solutions that provide pathologists with easy-to-use quantitative image analysis to improve clinical and research productivity, reproducibility, and consistency. Leica Biosystems is represented in over 100 countries. It has manufacturing facilities in 7 countries, sales and service organizations in 19 countries, and an international network of dealers. Further information can be found at www.leicabiosystems.com.


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Download The Red Badge of Courage Study Guide
The Red Badge of Courage
(Critical Guide to Censorship and Literature)
The Work
The Red Badge of Courage is a novel in which Henry Fleming, "the Youth," struggles with the question of whether he will fight or run when he sees his first real battle. After it begins, he stands firm for the first charge, then runs when the Confederate forces charge again. He is ashamed, wishing he had a bloody bandage, a "red badge of courage." Eventually, he returns to his outfit and becomes an obsessed fighter.
This book was first attacked when it was removed from the American Library Association list of approved books in 1896. However, its removal was more of a response to author Stephen Crane than to the book itself. As Crane was writing The Red Badge of Courage, he published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a gritty, realistic look at life in New York's slums that brought many calls for censorship against Crane. Also, Civil War veterans objected to a young man with no military experience writing detailed battle accounts. Nevertheless, the novel enjoyed a sustained popularity, occasionally being objected to by religious or antiwar and antiviolence groups. In 1985, for example, the superintendent of schools in a Florida community banned The Red Badge of Courage for profanity because it used the word "hell."
Bloom, Harold, ed. Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage." New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Examines style, technique, narrative method, and psychological aspects of Crane's novel. Places the novel in the epic tradition.
Cazemajou, Jean. "The Red Badge of Courage: The 'Religion of Peace' and the War Archetype." In Stephen Crane in Transition: Centenary Essays, edited by Joseph Katz. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1972. Finds a balance in the novel between a metaphoric view of war as chaos and confusion, and a view of a world at peace. War and peace function more as archetypes than as realities in the novel.
LaFrance, Marston. A Reading of Stephen Crane. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1971. Identifies Crane's genius not in creating literary naturalism, but rather in his psychological portrayal of Henry Fleming. Praises Crane's use of third-person limited point of view.
Mitchell, Lee Clark, ed. New Essays on 'The Red Badge of Courage.' New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Traces the novel's evolution; concludes that the original draft served as an outline to be expanded into the 1895 version. Identifies Crane's abstraction of the Civil War from its historical context as a distinctive contribution to American literature.
Solomon, Eric. Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. Credits Crane with countering a tradition of dashing heroes in war fiction by using parody and with giving the war novel a new form that afterward became the model. Maintains that Crane selects his war stories for their value as fiction, creating rather than reliving war experiences.
Places Discussed
(Critical Guide to Settings and Places in Literature)
Camp. Encampment of Henry's regiment where the novel opens. Although the regiment has only been lodged there for a few months, the novel's initial location seems to Henry to be "sort of eternal camp." In the opening paragraph, as a fog clears to display the awakening army, roads "grow" in the distance from "long troughs of liquid mud." The shore of a nearby river is occupied by the enemy, whose campfires glow by night on the ridges of low hills. Sometimes pickets posted as sentries on opposite banks shoot at one another; however, at other times they converse peaceably, their enmity set aside.
The regiment's lodgings are log-walled huts roofed with folded tents. Cracker boxes serve as furniture, grouped around fireplaces whose chimneys—crudely compounded out of clay and sticks—are inefficient, with the effect that the atmosphere inside each hut is foul with smoke: an omen of the battlefield to come.
Henry's home
Henry's home. Henry remembers life on his widowed mother's dairy farm as an endless round of trudging between the house, the barn,...
(The entire section is 5,437 words.)


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- IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology. Deadline: 26 March 2010.
- WI–IAT 2010 Workshop on Web Personalization and Recommender Systems (WebPRES 2010). Deadline: 16 April 2010.
- Trust and Recommender Systems for Social Search and Web-Log Analysis. Deadline: 16 April.
- ACM Recommender Systems. Deadline: 16 April (abstracts), 23 April 2010 (papers).
Journals/Special Issues:
- Special Issue on: "Recommender Systems to Support the Dynamics of Virtual Learning Communities" on International Journal of Web Based Communities. Deadline: 30 March 2010.
- Special Issue on "Social Linking and Hypermedia", on New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Deadline: 11 June 2010.
- Special Issue on "Social Recommender Systems", on ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. Deadline: 16 July 2010.
- Special Issue on "Adaptation and Personalization for Ubiquitous Computing", on Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (Springer). Deadline: 30 November 2010.
- Social Network Analysis and Mining, Springer.