SEEKING THE TRUTH IN SOLOMON, TX: A CONVERSATION WITH DAN HAMMOND JR.

 

Sporting dark sunglasses and sipping black coffee, Dan Hammond’s demeanor calls to mind Tom Robbins– a suggestion that the Denton-based writer would certainly deflect. Stationed at the edge of the bar at West Oak Coffee, the humble Hammond thumbs away at a cell phone that he admits to not fully understanding. “My boys have had to teach me a lot about stuff like this.” He beams whenever we come to the subject of his two sons, and it’s clear that his passion for fatherhood is only matched by his love of writing.

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SELECTED TWEETS: CORN ON THE CROSS

By Christopher Hughes  

Corn on the cross, tweeted 2/18/13 

Corn on the cross, tweeted 2/18/13 

There was a table in the kitchen that expanded from the middle, napkins made from cheap cloth dyed burgundy, and little wooden napkin rings.  It all came from my mother.  She had insisted with a kind of maternal fervor that implied both satisfaction and expectation, and I knew that any resistance to her offering would result in hard feelings.  So I took it and went to the grocery store and bought ten packages of spaghetti noodles and ran into five people on aisle sixteen.  They peered invasively into my cart.  I’m having a dinner party, I said, and they invited themselves.  When I got to the checkout line, the clerk called me Mister Hughes.  It was either a sign of respect or mockery, I couldn’t tell.  He wore a cap that said Jesus Saves.  I wondered if it was religious or an advertisement.  He scanned the noodles, the sauce, all the veggies I intended to cut and dice and sauté, with a curious look on his face, and I sensed he was going to ask.  It’s for a dinner party, I said.  Could I have the leftovers, he asked.  Sure, I said.  I like to put corn in my sauce, he said.  For consistency.  Okay, fine, I told him.  He called over the bagging kid and sent him on an errand.  The line backed up.  The kid returned with multiple ears of corn.  The clerk scanned them, grinning.

            When I got home, I put on some Bill Evans, washed a pile of dishes in the sink, brought out the half empty bottle of gin that I’d hidden away after an unfortunate evening some months ago.  I poured two fingers and dumped in the olive juice and called it a martini.  Then I mopped the floor with Pine-Sol, wiped down the table with lemon-scented Pledge, straightened the framed pictures hanging crooked on the walls, changed the litter, vaccumed the cat hair off of everything, made the bed, moved the piles of books on the living room floor to the bedroom floor, and lit a ten dollar candle that smelled like cotton candy.  People began to arrive soon after, all of them with a single bottle of red wine in hand.  I led them to the corkscrew.  We drank with purpose.  Groups of three or four clustered around my living room and chatted agreeably about whatever.  I went to the kitchen and stared at the corn and wondered what to do with it.  After an hour or so, the food was done.  I put a stack of dishes and utensils on the kitchen counter and a line formed.  I watched them as they scooped the noodles onto their plates, stirred and poured thick red sauce dotted with yellow specks, grabbing at toast soaked in butter and refilling their wine glasses.  We sat down to eat and somebody offered to say a blessing and it got awkard.  I drank more.  So did they.  My cooking was adequate. Then I remembered the leftovers, and all of a sudden tupperware became important to me, and I thought maybe I was a grownup.

 

 Christopher Hughes is the author of Selected Tweets, a spoken word project and ongoing collection of prose poems based around the idea of giving context to his otherwise vague Twitter feed. He is the singer, guitarist and songwriter for The Calmative, and he produces other artists as well, out of his studio, Miscellaneous Sound. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School, has been published in Pax Americana, Omnia Vanitas Review and the Augury Books blog, and lives within spitting distance of Midway Mart.

LITERARY ARTIST: DARIN BRADLEY

Words by Harlin Anderson, Image by Erin Rambo

Photo by Erin Rambo

Photo by Erin Rambo

We recently cornered local novelist, Darin Bradley, as he sipped a beer by the smoker and stoked the coals under a batch of his special recipe Lemon Pepper Chicken. Talk inevitably turned to his critically-acclaimed debut novel, Noise, but damned if we weren’t distracted by the smell of that yard bird. Lucky for you, we got the whole chat transcribed all fancy like.

Noise  is one of the most horrifying books we’ve ever read. What drove you to embark on such a dark literary undertaking?

It wasn't always so disturbing. The original idea was simple: two young men who rise to power in an unstable U.S. based solely on their wits and resourcefulness. It wasn't an overly sophisticated concept, and I carried it around in the back of my mind for several years while I worked on other projects. When I finally decided it was time to write Noise (it was called Amaranth back then), I decided that I needed to know the architecture behind re-making the U.S. (Was there a "right way" to do something like this? Should my characters follow some Plan?) As the story came together, and international financial collapse became the stage, the earliest tenets of "The Book"  began to surface (the guide the characters assemble in the novel to help them establish their nation-state). It became clear very quickly that I needed to actually write the entire "Book" before approaching the story, so I asked myself straightforward questions about what I would do to survive and protect my loved ones if the rule of law collapsed. I didn't always like the answers I came up with, but I felt they were true to the spirit of the exercise. It's this hard-line, no-exceptions, survival-at-all-costs program that made the novel as dark as it became. My characters adhered to my "Book" with dangerous, obsessive exactitude, and the results were pretty gruesome.

You created sympathetic, likable characters and then put them through absolute hell. Does that take its toll on you in real life?

Absolutely. The characters in Noise are portraits of real people—myself included. Many of Hiram's memories are my own, so to revisit them under circumstances that twisted their meanings and contexts wasn't exactly pleasant. I had to surprise myself with the cold, surgical violence in order to later surprise my readers with it—there's a fine line between believable shock value and engineered shtick, and staying on the right side of it, for me, involves not really knowing what you're doing at every given moment. My characters are young (early twenties) and angry and confused—just as most of us are at that age. The apocalypse occurring around them becomes just a giant metaphor for their tumultuous inner lives as they try to make the world work the way they want it to. When the world pushes back, it's difficult to just powerlessly read about the psycho-social damage this must be doing to those kids. In the real world, I'm a tolerant, progressive Denton townie—it definitely felt weird to borrow sociopathy and Fascism as I wrote the novel.

The town in  Noise  seems eerily familiar. Any truth to the rumor that it's actually set in a fictionalized Denton?

Ha! Yes: completely true. Here's the very duplex I lived in that appears in the novel: I renamed it Slade, and I moved a few things around, but it's absolutely supposed to be Denton. I didn't want to be restricted by the actual layout of Denton, in case I needed to take creative license, so I just rebranded it. Some of the streets even retain their real names, but some were jazzed up a bit for the fiction: Carroll became "Broadway" (even though Denton already has a Broadway), and Hickory became "Meyer." In a way, the book dates itself by the portrait it paints of Denton. In Noise, there are still longhorns grazing in the old Rayzor pasture, and Fry St. looks like it did before the recent developments (including a fragment of a burned-down pizza place). If you remember what the parking lot behind Cool Bean's looked like five years ago, then you've got the perfect mental stage for Hiram's gruesome act of vehicular assault against the "Strip Rat"—see, even Fry Rats made their way in.

What’s your connection to this area?

I moved to Denton in 1999, earned all three degrees here, burned through a fair portion of my twenties, and then my wife and I moved to the Carolinas in 2007. I had just finished a Ph.D. in cognitive theory and experimental literature, so I was positively buzzing with, quite possibly, the most sophisticated trains of thought I'll ever have in my lifetime. And I was unemployed. And homesick. Noise arose from this miasma and became, in many ways, a lament for the city I didn't think we'd ever come back to. I burned it down—a sort of exorcism so I could move on with the next chapter of my life. Luckily, though, we came back in 2010, and now we're here to stay.

What items should be in everyone’s bug out bag?

Mundane things. The first thing everyone wants to reach for is an AK or a sword or a shoulder-mounted anti-tank weapon. But you're going to need water purification technology, bandages, food, and fire starters. (Unless you want to cheat, like Hiram, and just beat people up and steal their stuff.) But, to be fair, I'm not bugging out without my revolver . . . 

What are you working on these days?

I'm writing the third book of what I think of as the Noise Cluster. The books don't comprise a trilogy, but they do represent three different experiments in the worlds of collapse, depression, and identity. With each new book, I try to challenge myself to write something more compelling--more contemplative—so I hope this final title will hold to that tradition. We'll see. I'm supposed to be writing it right now, but thank god you came along with these questions because I was really just staring out the window. You know: "writing."

EXCERPT from Noise

We got the jump because we lived near the square.  Walking distance.  Slade was like most small Texas towns--it radiated outward from the old courthouse.  At some point, someone had paved the original hitching yards and erected a cenotaph for the Civil War dead.  There were water fountains on each pillar, each with its own inscription:  White. Colored.  They both still worked.  There were pecan trees with dubious histories.

Livery posts, hardware stores, and hotels had clustered slowly around the squared avenue--the buildings still stared at the courthouse-turned-museum, the remnants of their painted-brick signs now protected by city codes.  Those businesses were all something else now--candy shops, bars, high-end boutiques.  But they had several signs each.  Meyer's Pawn was the most important to us.  Guitars and drum sets and stereos filled its storefront windows--the ejecta of the nearby university.  Its bread-and-butter music program, mostly.  Slade still lived because the university owned most of it.  Sweet Pine, Siwash, and Minnie Falls, all nearby, had dried up when they were supposed to, half a century before.  When Slade should’ve gone.

But we didn't care about instruments.  Meyer's had tools, too.

We got the jump.  We’d been watching Salvage for months, so we knew what to do. 

We knew enough.

Novelist, Eagle Scout, documentarian, linguist, video game writer, brew master, and student of the smoker, Darin Bradley is a true Renaissance Man who makes his home right here in the heart of Denton. Keep an eye out for his next project, and if you haven’t yet read Noise – turn off the television and crack a damn fine book. We guarantee you won’t regret it.   

Harlin Anderson is the underground BBQ champion of Denton, Texas. When he's not digging through crates of vinyl at Recycled Books or Mad World Records, he can be found manning the smoker on the back patio at Dan's Silver Leaf - or wherever there are hungry musicians. His lives with his wife, Ashley, and their three furry children: Earl, Jake, and Nanette the Pocket Beagle. He prefers to stay comfortably within the Denton city limits at all times.