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Marc Palatucci, Intern

In my family, there is a story that has been told and retold countless times over the past few decades. It involves my grandfather Oscar. As the story goes, a young, robust Oscar climbs the ladder to the high dive at the local public swimming pool with a lit cigarette tucked firmly between his lips. Eventually he makes his way to the lofty platform, and approaches the edge. At this point he pauses, and with his hands at his sides, manipulates his mouth in such a way as to flip the still burning cigarette backwards, gripping the butt between his teeth, clenching his lips shut, and leaving the ember hovering precariously above his tongue.
He then leaps from the diving board, holding his breath along with the onlookers as he plummets, eventually plunging into the water below. Upon surfacing, he spins the cigarette back out of his mouth, and exhales a triumphant billow of smoke, to the delight and awe of the spectators. Now, as the years have passed, I cannot help but question the veracity of this story. Of course any tale that travels by word of mouth will develop certain idiosyncrasies with each telling, but even the facts of this account seem hard to believe. Nevertheless, I see it as an heirloom of sorts, and I tell it fondly, if incredulously.

Along with the family lore, another inheritance of mine is an avid love of words. During my childhood, dinner table conversation was rife with obscure vocabulary, lighthearted debates on grammar and usage, and inevitably the stories of how words and phrases came to be. These stories, or etymologies, were always fanciful, and revealed to me the boundless level of imagination embedded in our language. With this sense of fascination about linguistic histories instilled in me from a young age, I was instantly curious when David Wilton’s book Word Myths landed on my desk. I was at once enthralled and repelled. You see, throughout my studies and conversations on linguistics, I had heard whispers here and there that certain of the etymological tales that had delighted me as a child were not entirely accurate. Now here was a book, a legitimate, well researched book, designed to discount those stories. The integrity of my childhood was at stake! Nonetheless, my curiosity prevailed, and I dove in. Much to my relief, the dear recollections from my youth were not corrupted or denatured. Rather, the book was teeming with captivating linguistic legends, with some of the substantiated anecdotes proving more whimsical than those that were fabricated. Alas, I could no longer believe in good conscience that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, as I had been told, but all was not lost. It turns out some Eskimo languages do have many words for snow, in the same way English has many words for water (ocean, sound, brook, rivulet, cascade, and so on). Thus, there was some kernel of truth at the heart of the myth.

It turned out the doubts I had feared about the fictitious etymologies were no more damaging than my doubts about the legend of my grandfather’s aquatic feat. The mere bounds of reality simply cannot detract from stories so great. With words and stories both, there are no fine lines or distinct boundaries of meaning. That is the very source of their wonder. Stories are not always intended to convey facts, but to stimulate the mind. Myths are invented to explain and describe the unfathomable and ineffable, swapping fact for metaphor. It is a debate of the scientist versus the poet, but my allegiance lies somewhere between the two. A day will come when I sit around the dinner table with children of my own, and I will most certainly let my imagination get the better of me. Yes, I will regale them with tales of their great grandfather’s high dive daredevilry, and I will probably cite some statistical hyperbole on Eskimo linguistics for good measure. I will not be lying to them, I will be entertaining them, enthusiastically so, and without pause, taking solace in the fact that the best stories are always, quite literally, incredible.

In the absence of knowledge of physical and cultural clues, communication between two species can be almost impossible.
Copic markers with Staedtler fineliner pen. 25cm x 11cm. Click to enlarge.

Bodies are wrapped in a plain white shroud and wheeled to the graveside on an ancient iron trolley.
Two-colour linocut 26cm x 26cm. Click to enlarge.

The challenge this week on another illustration blog is "fire".
Edward Slovik was arrested and served jail time for several incidents of petty theft, breaking and entering and disturbing the peace, between 1937 and 1939. Slovik was classified as unfit for duty in the U.S. military because of his criminal record.
He met Antoinette Wisniewski while working at a plumbing company in Dearborn, Michigan, and the two were married in 1942. The intensity of World War II forced the military to lower their standards in order to meet demands for replacement troops. As a result, Slovik's draft classification was changed and he was drafted into the infantry in January 1944.
During training, Slovik earned the reputation of being a good-natured buddy and learned to fire a rifle (which he hated) and other weapons. He was assigned to the 28th Infantry Division, stationed in France.
En route to the front, when his group of replacements was fired on, they stopped and dug in. Slovik and a friend became separated from the others. The two men soon came upon a camp of Canadian infantry and "joined" it, remaining with them for six weeks. Slovik finally rejoined his division, but he deserted almost immediately upon returning, ignoring the pleas of a friend not to leave. Slovik informed his company commander that he was "too scared" to serve in a rifle company and asked to be reassigned to a rear area unit. Slovik told the commander that he would run away if he were assigned to a rifle unit and asked him if that would constitute desertion. The commander confirmed that it would and refused his request for reassignment, assigning him to a rifle platoon.
A day later, Slovik voluntarily surrendered to an officer of the 28th Infantry Division, handing him a signed confession of desertion. However, he firmly stated he would run away again if forced to go into combat. The officer warned Slovik that his written confession was damaging evidence and advised him to destroy it. Slovik refused and he was confined in the division stockade.
Just prior to trial,m the division judge offered Slovik a deal under which the court-martial action would be dropped if he would go back to his unit. Slovik refused. As a result, Slovik was tried and convicted of desertion, although he pleaded not guilty at the trial. The sentence of death was voted unanimously.
Slovik wrote a letter to General Dwight D. Eisenhower pleading for clemency, but no basis for clemency was found. On December 23, in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower confirmed the death sentence. It was held that he "directly challenged the authority" of the United States and that "future discipline depends upon a resolute reply to this challenge." Slovik was to pay for his defiant attitude and he was to be made an example.
Slovik was executed by firing squad in January 1945. None of the rifleman so much as flinched, believing Slovik had gotten what he deserved. Slovik's last words were "They're not shooting me for deserting the United Stated Army - thousands of guys have done that. They're shooting me for bread I stole when I was 12 years old."
Although over twenty-one thousand soldiers were given varying sentences for desertion during World War II—including forty-nine death sentences—only Slovik's death sentence was carried out. He remains the only American soldier to be executed for desertion since the Civil War.

The California State Archivist reports on the status of archives, museums in affected fire areas in California via the California State Library Blog. [thanks anarchivist]

I've finished re-reading and re-re-revising my next manuscript, for a book called Fire, Kiss, Electric Chair (unless and until Putnam’s marketing department gets their hands on it) and making sure I've addressed all the points in my editor's seven-page, single-spaced editorial letter. He is known as one of the most thorough in the business for good reason.

[Full disclosure: and of course the book isn't really done. My editor still needs to approve my changes, and then there's the copy-editor, and page proofs, and galleys, and and and ...]

He had had me re-write it from third to first person, and come to think of it, most YAs are in first person. Here are some other things he wanted, so maybe you can steal some of these ideas:
- Need a better sense of Ellie. What makes her tick? Show her at school, with friends, involved in a hobby
- Bring depth to her emotions
- Sustain them
- Have them last longer than just reacting to previous bit of dialog
- She should be feeling a lot of emotions – she’s a teenager
- Show emotion toward her love object. Make us feel how she falls in love. Make her more gaga.
- Avoid over interpretation. I realized, I felt, I could tell that – passive and sound third person. Show us how she feels, not what things mean.
- Show, don't tell. [Full disclosure: didn't I already know that? But sometimes my editor pointed out places where I summarized and leached out the emotion in the process, ie, "Being patted down – even by a female cop – with my hands up against the wall and my legs spread apart, was humiliating and degrading." That was telling. I needed to show it.]
- The wrap up to any mystery or thriller can only be one chapter long.





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