| I have a tattoo
of Bugs Bunny’s head on my arm. The original impetus for getting
it, well, besides having a tattoo artist friend who offered me some free
work, was to have this cross-dressing trickster figure looking up at me
as a reminder, or a badge of humor. It did not occur to me then what people
have repeatedly told me since, namely that Bugs’ pose—with
his arms folded behind his head in an expression of relaxed pleasure—gives
the distinct impression that he is in the middle of getting a blow job.
As I say, I did not think of this when I got the tattoo, but I must admit
to liking the added meaning.
Bugs Bunny, like other, more ancient tricksters is a shape-shifter—switching
gender, role, appearance, attitude. I personally associate this kind of
protean quality with homosexuality and gender-fucking (an association
which is accurate to some trickster figures and their respective folkloric
traditions). Add to this the whole blow-job dealie and, for me, what you
get is a furry humorist who takes pleasure in changing form. This is all
a roundabout way of saying that this is precisely one of my own interests,
a kind of literary transvestism, dressing words up in drag so as to change
form and person.
In the accompanying pieces, what I mean to do is change form so as to
gain access to Narrativity. These various submission
query letters are, like most any query letter, a way of gaining entry.
They vary in their posture to the publication—demanding, dazed,
querulous, or even blurring the distinction between submitting to the
publication in literary and sexual ways. I come knocking on Narrativity’s
door by turns in the shape of a suitor, a plaintiff, a (hapless) menace.
Form interests me partly because of its implied use of expectation on
the part of the reader. By dressing up as a query letter (if there can
be fairly said to be anything beneath the language, or is it just me?),
I mean to shake the reader’s proverbial soda can of anticipation
about what the query letter intends. (Please pardon the mixed metaphor.)
The sort of shape-shifting or transvestism could be seen as deceptive.
But I mean to be no more disingenuous than a sort of bad drag queen. (Believe
me, I personally am too gawky to pull off anything but a sort of Halloweenish
drag, it’s embarrassingly heterosexual-seeming.) Bad drag, or rather
pathetic drag (in that it inspires pathos) is drag as drag. Consider me
a Bugs Bunny, all dressed up in fruit as Carmen Miranda, in search of
an Oscar.
– Paul
VanDeCarr
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