Quickie Interview #34: Salvatore Scibona

Salvatore Scibona did this whole entire interview on a twenty-five pound Underwood Champion manual typewriter (please see the document pictured at left) before transcribing it into electronic form. He is reading at Harvard Bookstore on Tuesday, July 1, at 7:00 pm from the novel, The End (Graywolf, 2008), that he wrote on that thing. If you live in Boston or thereabouts, for heaven’s sake, go see him!

Your first novel, The End, focuses on events that occur in Cleveland, Ohio on August 15th, 1953. The setting, obviously, is important—how did you pick it, and why?

I grew up outside Cleveland, post-white-flight, among a lot of old people who had spent their formative years in the city when it was big, polyglot, crowded, polluted, international, industrial, poor, and segregated—all things, except poor and segregated, that are dramatically less true of the city today.

Since 1950, Cleveland has lost more than half its population. The change has been so complete that the city my grandparents described was nearly impossible to imagine from what I saw of it myself. Many of the old neighborhoods and factories lay in ruins. With every new economic downturn, more and more of the remaining plants closed. My father worked for almost twenty years in a 17-acre plant that at one point had manufactured a majority of the engine valves produced in the world. But it was slowly dying the whole time he worked there, and it’s completely shut down now. There are plans to start a worm farm in it, but we shall see.

I had watched the city decay my whole life, and I wanted to experience it at its most alive.

How do you find your reading life is affected by your writing life and vice versa?

They are the same life. Or more precisely: reading is the indispensable food that makes the mind go, and when I don’t read for a day or two—I mean reading books—I have nothing to say.

I used to work for a bricklayer in Cleveland. On my way home I would stop to read for an hour at a Lake Erie dock, just off the Interstate, next to a power plant. The only other people there were middle-aged black guys quietly fishing for perch and sheephead. Nobody talked. The only sound was of the cars and the wind from the lake. I liked the job well enough as long as I kept up my reading habit on the way home.

But when I skipped a few days’ reading, my mind would go to mush, and (strange) I would get physically exhausted within a couple of hours on the job.

And I made the weird discovery that reading had a nutritional effect on my body, as well as on my imagination. Most writers I know are like this to some degree. The criminal in The End, an avid reader, is driven to his crimes by his sometime inability to focus on what he’s trying to read.

How long did you spend working on The End? In what ways is having the book out now like and/or unlike having all your wildest dreams come true?

For ten years.

The book itself is a more beautiful object than I could have hoped for: clean, spare, satisfying to hold. I had always assumed the publisher would wrap it in some exuberant ethnographic picture that had nothing to do with the book as it really is; but Graywolf does not operate that way.

Also: I assumed that I would despise the book once it was finished. But I don’t. I’m proud of it.

Your book has been published by the prestigious Graywolf Press—who is taller? You or Jeff Shotts?

Jeff, I believe.

You have made your home in Provincetown for many years, first as a fiction fellow and then as the Writing Coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center. Do you love it there? Will you stay there indefinitely? Do you ever consider moving back to Ohio where your vote stands to be more decisive in November?

The topsoil in Provincetown is almost devoid of organic matter, which poses certain challenges to the home gardener that an Ohioan would never face. However, the fishing is better here. We make compromises in life.

First Car?

A 1982 Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

What was your favorite book and band in high school?

Don’t make me say.

Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?

The Mormons. I’m joking.

First job?

At the Kentucky Fried Chicken across the street from Saint Joseph’s Church in Strongsville, Ohio. There, I learned the making of coleslaw in a trashcan grasped firmly between the knees while the slaw is churned with the decapitated and sanitized handle of an ax, using a motion akin to paddling in the bow of a canoe.

Car now?

A small sedan with four rusty doors.

Favorite book now?

That changes with the moon: Independent People by Halldór Laxness; Light Years by James Salter; the Iliad; The Waves; Libra; Herzog; Humboldt’s Gift; Mao II; The Names; Underworld; Jazz; Annie Dillard’s recent novel The Maytrees; Plato’s Phaedrus; To the Lighthouse; Anna Karenina; Go Down, Moses; Moby Dick; In the Skin of a Lion; Middlemarch.

What's new on your iPod or CD player?

Judee Sill: “Heart Food”

By the way, are we the last generation that will play “Name That Tune”? Until the late ’90s there was still such a thing as pop music—new songs that everybody heard on the radio enough times that the melodies got stuck in all our heads. I bet every living American over thirty can hum a song by the Supremes. But teenagers today seem to have more varied tastes in music; because of the way they find it, online. This is probably a healthy development, but I suspect we’re also going to lose another piece of our shared cultural life.

What's the best DVD you've rented of late?

“Bus 174”; “Some Like it Hot”; the last episode of The Sopranos.

What are you working on these days?

Who would have thought that the only state other than Alaska never to have recorded a temperature over 100 degrees is Hawaii? It must be the moderating influence of the Pacific winds.

What are you reading that's fun?

Talkingpointsmemo.com.

Also, Eat This . . . It’ll Make You Feel Better, by Dom DeLuise.

If you are a Democrat, and you are having a bad day, you might look at electoral-vote.com, which projects the results of the electoral-college vote based on constantly updated state-by-state polls. But control your feelings: pride goeth before the fall.

What's your favorite a) writing exercise, and b) physical exercise?

a) I just write.

b) Lately I run through the Provincetown dune trails to Race Point and then back to town, with Eminem and the Black Eyed Peas functioning as drum major.

What's your favorite piece of clothing?

A bowling shirt I found in my grandfather’s basement. The shirt has his name in blue cursive stitching on the left side of the chest and the name of the construction company he worked for across the back. I’m sure he never entered a bowling alley in his life. He probably got the shirt from the union and never wore it.

What are some of your guilty pleasures?

Fried chicken. Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song. The obit page of the Provincetown Banner.

Favorite recipe (please be specific, like so we can cook it if we want)?

Here’s something I like, based on a recipe by Marcella Hazan: a tomato salad that follows the ideal of preparing an ingredient so that it just tastes vibrantly of itself.

In a shot glass, mix a teaspoon of salt with four crushed cloves of garlic. Fill with red wine vinegar and let steep for thirty minutes. Throw out the garlic. Slice three large tomatoes into thick rounds and arrange them in overlapping layers on a broad, shallow dish. Tear a dozen leaves of basil over them, add fresh grindings of black pepper, pour on the vinegar, and cover with olive oil. Do not use cheap oil, yo.

Do not make this unless you have real homegrown or farmers’ market tomatoes, in season. Use a few different varieties, of different colors, if you please. Serve with bread to soak up the juice.

Most people to whom I’ve served this refer to what they’re eating as “tomatoes”—not a salad or a dish of any kind. Nothing gets in the way. It’s a plate of tomatoes, emphatically so.

What’s on your desk?

Blank white paper; scrap paper printed on one side with news stories; five half-used, yellow writing tablets; a clipboard; a pile of dead drafts; a little piece of chain; a green plastic mechanical pencil; a spiral notebook; a key ring; a mug with a family of penguins painted on it and various drying-out pens inside; a dictionary; a thesaurus; the King James Bible; a hand-held pencil sharpener in the shape of a plastic chapel; an Underwood Champion manual typewriter, gray, weighing approximately twenty-five pounds, that I have owned since the sixth grade; A Death in the Family by James Agee, which begins with this perfect sentence: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”
Stones or Beatles?

You pick. I’ll just put in these earplugs here.

Sometimes we ask Fitzgerald or Hemingway? Feel free to answer that, too, but also: Phillip Roth or Saul Bellow?

Bellow!

Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?

Rocky Manoa.