Contributor Confab: Ryan Murray-Rudegeair
"Congress shall make no laws limiting human imagination, or else no more taffy."
The man with the icy beard is Ryan Murray-Rudegeair, contributor of two prose poems(?) to the inaugural issue of slips slips. Ryan treats words as exotic pets that you can stroke and cuddle and teach tricks to and ultimately stack on top of each other to create larger, even more exotic pets. These pets then make you wonder if you were in fact the pet all along. This continues inconclusively for an unspecified amount of time.
ss: Is there any special background/context to your slips slips contribution that you'd like to share?
RM-R: Bren Star/Brain Star was originally written in something of a fit during peak Corona lockdown times. (I was a full-time parent then, and one inspiration was the tablet-based torture of going online with my wonderful kid every day for COVID school.) It was much longer, but I have cut more and more from it until it’s kind of a cross-section of a thing, like those thin layers of human tissue displayed upright and adult-sized behind glass at your better science museums.
A Mars Nag/A Snug Arm came after I spent a lot of time playing with anagrams, as you do when you get divorced. I wanted to write something that would be swimming in nutso anagrams, but interesting and relatively readable. Apart from the anagrams, the piece owes a debt to Harriet Zinnes’s Entropisms (1978)1, which you should read only if you like things that are very very good. Special note for anagram sleuths: the last paragraph contains anagrams of my name (Ryan Murray-Rudegeair), which is misspelled (as Ryan Murray-Rudegair) in the issue.2
ss: If you could unilaterally add one amendment to the U.S. Constitution, what would it be?
RM-R: It would be The √-1st Amendment, which we would pronounce “The Square Root of Negative First Amendment.” It would be nicknamed The Imaginary Amendment, and would read as follows:
The benefits of imagination accruing to a free people include, but are not limited to: flying bison with huge leathery bat wings, metal squirrels only they’re not robots, and benevolent snakes who somehow shit out delicious taffy, which people actually eat, and no one is like, “Gross, I am not eating candy from a snake’s butt.” The taffy is simply that good. Therefore, Congress shall make no laws limiting human imagination, or else no more taffy. Plus, the right of the people to wonder what consciousness is like for a nudibranch, cat, or peregrine falcon shall not be abridged or abraded. Moreover, not all of the rights guaranteed to the people under this Amendment have to do with animals. Love, Dad.
ss: What's the book everyone seeing this should read if they haven't already?
R-MR: I already mentioned Zinnes’s Entropisms above, but something else very very good is the Selected Works of Yi Sang published (in English translation from Korean and Japanese) by Wave Books in 2020. Yi Sang was a Korean architect, poet, fictioneer, and essayist who lived his whole life during the Japanese occupation of Korea and died young of TB in 1937. His stuff is influenced by European Dada and surrealism but is the sui-est of generis. He often makes the move I adore so much: combining medical/scientific/academic forms and trappings with the utterly batshit insane. Here are a few out-of-context lines from Yi Sang’s poems that flit across my mind all the time, and they are welcome to do so:
“13 children speed toward the way.” (from Poem No. 1)
”Problem concerning the patient’s face.” (from Poem No. 4)
“Birdie parrot is a mammal.” (from Poem No. 6)
“My arms, even though they are dead, seem terrified of me.” (from Poem No. 13).
NOTE: Ryan Murray-Rudegeair does not have a website or use social media, but instead recommends the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Any parties who are for some reason interested may write to Ryan Murray-Rudegeair, 3912 Minnehaha Ave, Apt. 15, Minneapolis MN 55406.
Learn more about slips slips at slipsslips.net
The internet doesn’t have much detail about this book, but used copies are findable. There’s only one rating for it on Goodreads, and it’s mine from when Ryan recommended it to me last fall. —Ed.
178% my fault —Ed.
The amendment shall pass, so long as the snake-taffy does as well.