Stanley Crouch gets physical

[Michael Fitzgerald]

No, not the saxophonist - some guy at the Village Voice.

Mike

[Nate Dorward]

Someone may now feel inspired to actually say some intelligent things about DeLillo and Joyce (not Leonard or Carlin Romano, so far though).

"Someone"? Get out of your armchair & go to the library--there's plenty of litcrit, some of it very fine, some of it just academic business-as-usual. There's no shortage of intelligent commentary on these writers, if you bother to look.

[Dr. Rat]

Someone may now feel inspired to actually say some intelligent things about DeLillo and Joyce (not Leonard or Carlin Romano, so far though).

"Someone"? Get out of your armchair & go to the library--there's plenty of litcrit, some of it very fine, some of it just academic business-as-usual. There's no shortage of intelligent commentary on these writers, if you bother to look.

I didn't mean for you to infer "there is no good criticism on these guys" but rather "Peck's attacks have yet to inspire an interesting defense."

Just for the record, I do occasionally get up from my well-weathered armchair and read some stuff. In fact, reading is what I probably do best--I'm ABD in English lit, and one of my concentrations was on high modernism/post-modernism.

So I am aware that criticism (some of it interesting) of DeLillo & Joyce exists.

--eric

Edited July 23, 2004 by Dr. Rat

[Larry Kart]

Eric -- If, as you say, "Peck's schtick gets tiresome," why should it "inspire an interesting defense" of late Joyce or of any DeLillo (the former IMO defensible but not my idea of a good time, the latter just claptrap) or anything else? One would be engaging -- implicitly or explictly -- in a dialogue in which the other party (Peck) already had demonstrated his bad faith by being (again IMO) more interested in engaging in power-games schtick than in anything else. It would, to close the circle perhaps, be like arguing with Stanley Crouch.

[Big Al]

My guess would be that he'd have been uglied to death.

Drat! Gotta wipe the Pepsi™ stains off the monitor again!

[Nate Dorward]

Peck's mix of one-liners & sneers isn't worth engaging with--it's knockabout entertainment pure & simple, relatively well-turned (the piece on David Foster Wallace was pretty good on those terms, though it basically was an occasion for unearned sneers at Pynchon using Wallace as a punching bag) but nothing close to sustained argument. If you want serious, sometimes damaging criticism of contemporary fiction that's worth engaging with you have to go to someone like James Wood.

[Dr. Rat]

Peck's mix of one-liners & sneers isn't worth engaging with--it's knockabout entertainment pure & simple, relatively well-turned (the piece on David Foster Wallace was pretty good on those terms, though it basically was an occasion for unearned sneers at Pynchon using Wallace as a punching bag) but nothing close to sustained argument. If you want serious, sometimes damaging criticism of contemporary fiction that's worth engaging with you have to go to someone like James Wood.

Sure Wood's better than Peck. But I also think that Peck's best is far better than thr tired whitewash we get in negative reviews of "Hatchet Jobs."

There's a joint review of Peck and Wood in TLS (below) that I think hits the mark fairly closely, though, unlike Wood, I really like the satiric/corrective tradition, a tradition that Peck is defintiely a part of, though he's rather a smalll one in it.

Larry Kart writes:

One would be engaging -- implicitly or explictly -- in a dialogue in which the other party (Peck) already had demonstrated his bad faith by being (again IMO) more interested in engaging in power-games schtick than in anything else.

I'm not altogether sure that Peck's grand-standing ought to be taken as bad faith. Personally I don't think criticism is just a propositional undertaking (I propose that DeLillo's novels are largely a waste of time for reasons a,b, &c)--it's also performative.

And, yes, that means playing some power games, but these games are always being played either on or underneath the surface.

Peck's mistake is that he, I think, starts violating "decorum" for its own sake rather than to drive home a point or to get people off the dime. That's where he becomes tiresome. Egotism? Yes. Bad faith? I don't think so.

In fact, my read is that Peck is a fairly earnest person at heart.

I'm not at alll sure what is to be gained by actually engaging Peck personally, considering the corner he paints himself into, but I think it would be constructive to move certain of his concerns up on the agenda.

Here's the TLS piece:

The invaluable James Wood

Robert MacFarlane

22 July 2004

CRITICS AT WORK

Interviews 1993-2003

 

317pp. | New York University Press. $20. | 0 8147 9389 4

 

HATCHET JOBS

Writings on contemporary fiction

Dale Peck 

328pp. | New York: New Press. $23.95. | 1 56584 874 8

 

THE IRRESPONSIBLE SELF

On laughter and the novel

James Wood 

312pp. | Cape. £16.99. US: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24. 0 347 417737 6 | 0 224 06450 9

 

Full story displayed

Dale Peck is notorious in American letters for the informality of his critical language. Of Ian McEwan he has observed that: “the man’s books smell worse than newspaper wrapped round old fish”. Of Raymond Carver and the K-mart school of realism: “how awful does most of that **** seem now?”. Of Rick Moody: “For me the beginning of a [Moody] book is a bit like having a stranger walk up and smack me in the face, and then stand there waiting to see if I’m man enough to separate him from his balls”. And of David Foster Wallace: “the author of Infinite Jest [should] maybe shut off his damn word processor and try to find someone who would passionately shove a dick up his ass”. The italics are in the original.

Three years’ worth of Peck’s attack-dog essays are now published in Hatchet Jobs. Perhaps the only interesting aspect to Peck’s prose is that it obliges one to consider how far decorum is desirable within literary criticism. One answer to this question – Peck’s answer – would be that “decorum” is another word for “pussyfooting” and that, given the ever- decreasing circle of novel readers and the ever-increasing circle of novel writers, it is vital for critics to tell it exactly how it is. An alternative answer might be that “decorum” is another word for “intellectual finesse”, and that as soon as one puts on the boxing gloves of insult, one loses the capacity to make the fine separations which worthwhile criticism requires.

There are, it is true, moments when one admires Peck’s directness: the short shrift he gives to so-called “identity fiction”, for instance, or his peerless definition of bad postmodern prose as “a footnote that doesn’t know when to stop”. The recurrent problem with Peck’s denunciations of bad writing, however, is that they are themselves badly written. He excels at the metaphoric mix-up. In an aggressive essay on Sven Birkerts he warns that “a critic whose own hands are stained with so much carelessly spilled ink ought to be more careful about the mud he flings”. Just so. In a self-justifying afterword concerning his critical belligerence, he observes that: “My sharpest barbs tend to be directed at writers I genuinely admire, or in whom I see genuine, wasted talent. This is because I think of myself as kind of mother hen, not so much of writers, but of the novel itself. Fiction is like dance: it’s susceptible to the egos of its practitioners”. Faced with this paragraph – moving as it does with such spellbinding clumsiness between harpooning, poultry and dance – one might conclude that Dale Peck is not a man to trust on matters of literary tone.

Like Dale Peck, James Wood has little fondness for the late-twentieth-century novel, though Wood’s fastidious and mandarin utterances on the subject could not be further removed from Peck’s bullishness. Writing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical essays in 1998, Wood noted, with a characteristic flourish of simile, that Murdoch “returns fondly to Shakespeare and Tolstoy, like someone returning to the city of her honeymoon”. The city of Wood’s own honeymoon is, unmistakably, Henry James, though he also appears to have holidayed happily in the work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Knut Hamsun and Joseph Roth. It is from James that Wood derives his tenet that good fiction must contain “characters of free and serious depth”. It is from James that he derives his belief in the unique capacity of the novel form not only to describe human morality in action, but also to reach out and act on the moralities of its readers. And it is from James, too, that he derives the title of his astringently brilliant new collection of essays, The Irresponsible Self.

Wood began his career, as he has continued it, precociously. He was appointed as the Guardian’s “Chief Literary Critic” in 1991, when he was only twenty-six. Three years later, he judged the Booker Prize, helping to choose the so-called “Mogadon shortlist” of 1994 (James Kelman won with How Late It Was, How Late), and was shortly afterwards wooed to Washington, DC, to become a senior editor for the New Republic. He has remained there since, writing long and ardent commentaries on fiction for the New Republic and the London Review of Books. A selection of these essays formed his first book of criticism, The Broken Estate: Essays on literature and belief (1999), in which Wood marked himself out as a reader of extreme ethical rigour, who expected a reciprocal rigour from his writers. Those novelists who he believed were betraying the integrity of their form – Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon and Julian Barnes among them – he chastised almost to the point of fatality.

Wood grew up in a strongly Anglican household, an experience which informed his first novel, The Book against God (2003), and his critical essays have, undoubtedly, a touch of the sermon to them. It is there in their passion, in their occasionally burly pedagogy, and in their faith in metaphor not as an adornment to critical insight, but as a method of perception in itself. Yet Wood’s salutary fierceness can best be understood as belonging to a secular tradition of novelist-moralists which begins with James, and runs through Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch and reaches (though Wood has never written on him) Nicholas Mosley. Wood shares with these writers a conviction that the novel’s special mandate is to investigate and to remedy human behaviour in ways which other forms – journalism, criticism, poetry – cannot.

The Irresponsible Self partly extends and partly restates the critical credo which Wood announced in The Broken Estate. The book’s originality lies in the distinction which is made between two different comic traditions of the novel. The first of these Wood calls the “comedy of correction”, and he finds it to be a charismatically Anglo-American mode, whose practitioners include Jonathan Swift, Evelyn Waugh and both the Amises. “Corrective” comic novelists, he proposes, have a faith in humour as a morally detergent force of the highest alkali. The purpose of their comedy is to scourge and to check society, and to this end their novels contain a predominance of characters who are in some way faulty. The “corrective” novelist’s job is to arrange the embarrassment of the characters; the reader’s is to administer the punishment of laughter.

Wood has little love for this tradition (which might also go by the name of satire), for he finds that its characters are not permitted to be (as James put it in The Art of the Novel) “plastic [and] irresponsible”, but are obliged instead to be exemplary. He finds far more to cherish in the European tradition of the “comedy of forgiveness”, in which “a mild tragi-comedy arises naturally out of context and situation”. These tragicomedies are staffed by characters who are “unreliably unreliable”. That is to say, they are novels “in which the reader may not always know why a character does something or may not know how to ‘read’ a passage and feels that in order to find these things out, he must try to merge with the characters in their uncertainty”. Where the comedy of correction scorns and stings, the comedy of forgiveness absolves; it entices its readers to “merge” sympathetically with the characters, and thus to be themselves profitably changed.

Wood takes the first half of his book (which includes fine essays on European writers such as Bohumil Hrabal, Giovanni Verga, Italo Svevo, Hamsun and Roth) to elaborate these two positions. He spends its second half examining the wrong turning that the Anglo-American comic novel has taken since the Second World War, chiding those (Tom Wolfe, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo) he holds responsible for this misdirection, and praising those (V. S. Pritchett, Saul Bellow, Monica Ali) who have remained on the path of righteousness.

Much of the chiding takes place in a long centrepiece essay entitled “Hysterical Realism”. This nimble phrase – which plays so elegantly and suggestively off “historical realism” – was coined by Wood in a New Republic essay on White Teeth from July 2000. He used it there to denote the contemporary idea of the “big, ambitious novel”. It is

"a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity . . . .

Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Recent novels have featured . . . a talking dog, a mechanical duck, a giant octagonal cheese, and two clocks having a conversation (Pynchon); a nun called Sister Edgar who is obsessed with germs and who may be a reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover, and a conceptual artist painting retired B-52 bombers in the New Mexico desert (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec called the Wheelchair Assassins, and a film so compelling that anyone who sees it dies (Foster Wallace). This is not magical realism. It is hysterical realism.Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted and overworked. "

In the four years since that essay, Wood has returned to his idea of hysterical realism on at least five occasions, and his pathological reading of “the big contemporary novel” has become extremely influential. Among those writers Wood has now certified as “hysterics” are Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers (“an IQ-with-an-I-Book”). For Wood, these writers have all been misled by a mimetic heresy: the heresy which states that only the novel which tries to reproduce a culture might be in a position to criticize that culture. In their attempts formally to allegorize the hybridity, rapidity and triviality of contemporary society, these novels – Infinite Jest and Underworld chief among them – have themselves ended up lush, rapid and trivial.

What angers Wood most of all is that, by falling for this heresy, these “novels” have also forsaken the possibility of “meaningful ethical utterance”. This is partly a consequence of their obsession with narrative – they are so boisterously concerned with telling many stories that they tell no one story well enough for it to become “real” – but it is also, Wood proposes, because of their love affair with “information”.

The provision of “information” was something we might previously have associated with Tom Clancy-style airport novels: cubical volumes densely packed with instructions about how to steer a nuclear submarine, or prime and fire a Stinger Missile. Recently, however, “information” has infiltrated the “literary” novel, in the form of long digressions, or as Op Ed-style journalistic riffs, or as factoids pocking the narrative. The result, as Wood neatly puts it, is that “information has become the new character”. Again, this violates the moral mandate of the novel. Because so many of these novels’ characters exist either as the purveyors of information or as precipitates of information, we never undergo the process of getting to know them as people. They are, to borrow a phrase from Foster Wallace, “only borderline homosapiens”, and feeling anything for them – or sympathetically learning anything from them – would be like trying to make friends with a Cray computer.

What, though, would Wood like to see instead of “hysteria”? How would he like to see contemporary fiction behaving itself? The short answer is that he wishes to see a return to the patient and unblinking moral intelligence of the Jamesian novel: a recovery of what James calls “deep-breathing economy and organic form”. Most of the time, Wood writes with such felicity and zeal that one feels neither the inclination nor the possibility of disagreeing with him on this score. Occasionally, however, he lets his passion override his perceptiveness. An example comes in his essay on Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, where he admires that book for returning what he has elsewhere called the “antique weight” of the novel form. Of the new wave of British and American writers who are fictionalizing “immigrant experiences”, he remarks that:

"[their] new material has another and perhaps more momentous service to perform, which is to return fiction to its nineteenth-century gravity. This it does by re-importing into the Western novel traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty, and pressures of propriety – and thereby restoring to the novel form some of the old oppressions that it was created to comprehend and to resist and in some measure to escape. This was the case with Vikram Seth’s massive panorama A Suitable Boy, and it is the case with . . . Brick Lane."

“Restoring to the novel form some of the old oppressions”; Wood sounds here like a critical Canute, ordering the tide back, and hoping to see his beloved nineteenth-century forms emerging like woodhenges from the receding sea. Even ignoring the troubling hint of nostalgia for “ties . . . burdens . . . pressures”, one is pulled up short by a failure of logic. What shaped the nineteenth-century novel, Wood declares, was that it had something to push against – something “to comprehend and to resist”. By implication, the contemporary novel has nothing to “resist”; there are no new forces of “oppression”. Existing as it does within a frictionless torrent of trivia, it has lost its shape and its purpose; or rather, it has become a muscle-bound, brainless parody of itself, bulked up on the steroids of data and story. But, what, one wants to ask Wood, of the “oppressions” which have so palpably afflicted the past forty years? The oppressions of rapacious consumerism, say, or of autocratic governments, or, at the level of the individual, of depression. Don’t these qualify? And what of the fact that many of the novelists he denounces as hysterics – Pynchon, DeLillo, Franzen, Foster Wallace, Philip Roth – are not only aware of these oppressions, they are also obsessed, in their fiction and their critical writings, with the question of how the novel form might “comprehend, resist and in some measure escape” them. Here, as occasionally elsewhere in The Irresponsible Self, Wood seems to be cutting his cloth to suit his measurements.

Turning to Critics at Work, sixteen interviews with American “cultural critics”, one immediately develops a nostalgic fondness for Dale Peck. At least, one feels, Peck has something to say. Critics at Work is designed, according to its editor, Jeffrey J. Williams, to dispel the sense that “ideas come fully formed and have a life of their own”. It is not clear exactly who still subscribes to notions of such serene intellectual parthenogenesis; surely not, at any rate, the savvy brigade of post-post-structuralists who comprise the only possible audience for a book of this sort. But an uncertainty as to audience – or rather, a desire that the book will reach out beyond its obvious and limited constituency of MLA members – characterizes Critics at Work. It is audible in the master-of-ceremonies rhetoric by which Williams introduces Paul de Man as “the deconstructionist theorist Paul de Man” and Derrida as “the philosopher Jacques Derrida”, and it is audible, too, in the toe-curling punnery of the chapter titles – “Stanley Agonistes: An interview with Stanley Fish”, or “Sedgwick Unplugged: An interview with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick” – presumably intended to jolly along tired readers .

In the main, the content of the interviews falls short even of the entertainment so awkwardly advertised by their titles. Too many are about the institutional structures – university funding policies, MLA and ASA protocols – which “inflect” the positions of American critics. And reading the later interviews with theorists of “radicalization” such as Alan Wald and Barbara Foley, one experiences the peculiar insulating effect which high critical language has on political anger; like watching people shouting loudly at each other behind glass. The two interviews that stand out, indeed, and that go some way towards validating the existence of the volume, are with two self-confessed “generalists”, Louis Menand and Morris Dickstein, both of whom speak with clarity of the role and history of the public intellectual. Dickstein remarks that “criticism which stays criticism” does so because of “the elegance of the attack . . . . Great critics often write aphoristically, with bold leaps of metaphor and association”. So we are returned to Wood, who writes in precisely this way, and whose enthusiasm provides such an attractive alternative to the truculence of Dale Peck, and the bloodlessness of “in-house” academic criticism. In a literary world which is so often either relaxed into the flabby indifference of review-speak, or corseted into position with the strings and eyelets of critical jargon, James Wood’s tone is invaluable.

[Larry Kart]

Given Dale Peck's "For me the beginning of a [Rick Moody] book is a bit like having a stranger walk up and smack me in the face, and then stand there waiting to see if I’m man enough to separate him from his balls,” it seems more and more like he and Stanley Crouch were made for each other. In fact, even though Stanley seems ready to take the face-smacking route (or worse) at most times, I wonder whether he was directly inspired by this passage. When Life imitates Criticism?

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Why the hanging judge can't keep his hands to himself

Crouching Stanley, Hidden Gangsta

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

July 24th, 2004 12:00 PM

I reserve the right to be a nigger.

—Aaron McGruder

Stanley Crouch is a gangsta rapper. Throughout his career, Crouch has

moved through black nationalism, bohemia, and places we haven't yet

developed the vocab to name. But if there's one thing we've gleaned

from Crouch's recent assault on novelist and critic Dale Peck, it is

this—we have found Crouch's muse, and his name is Suge Knight.

The backstory is simple, and for Crouch routine. On July 12, out for

lunch at Tartine in the West Village, Crouch spotted Peck, who'd

trashed his book Don't the Moon Look Lonesome a few years back. After

greeting Peck with one hand, Crouch smacked him with the other. "What

I would actually have preferred to happen," says Crouch, "was that I

had the presence of mind to hawk up a huge oyster and spit it in his

face."

Crouch claims he recieved several calls thanking him for the act,

which wouldn't be a surprise given that Peck made his name by penning

extended negative and, often personal, reviews of other fiction

writers.

This was not a moment of hot-headed indiscretion. Crouch may use his

perch at the Daily News to inveigh against gangsta rap with all

deliberate fury and alarm ("Hip Hop's Thugs Hit New Low," "Hip Hop

Gets The Bruising It Deserves," or "Morally, Allen Iverson's a Bad

Guy"), but his habit of violent exchanges with writers and editors

puts him a notch above Snoop on the ne'er-do-well scale. In most cases

gangsta rap is just talk—Biggie and Tupac are the exceptions. But

while Crouch has yet to peel caps, the gangsta ethos is realer for him

than it is for your average gun-talker.

"The thing is that Stanley will get gangsta on you," says Nelson

George, who worked with Crouch here at the Voice, in the 1980s. "There

is nothing more gangsta than just walking up and pimp-slapping

someone. Not even punching them, just slapping them, almost as a sign

of disrespect."

It's almost unfair to accuse Crouch of taking a page from, say, Masta

Killa—Crouch was smacking critics when hip-hop was still laceless

shelltops and battle raps. Along with being one of the great essayists

of his generation, Crouch has always been a man who took Ishmael

Reed's Writin' Is Fightin' a little too seriously. During his colorful

tenure at this paper, Crouch repeatedly threatened editors and menaced

fellow writers. By the time Crouch left, he'd sealed his rep as an

iconoclastic curmudgeon and a critic without peer. His litany of

incidents usually began with debates over some bit of jazz arcana and

ultimately ended in fisticuffs.

"Stanley deserves better than his own temper" says jazz writer Peter

Watrous, who also worked here with Crouch. "There are two things that

happen at the same time—one of them is that Stanley is a utopian. He

strongly believes people should behave in certain way. That combines

with an inability to control his own temper, and it makes for a

bullying streak."

There was the time Crouch was arguing with jazz writer Russ Musto and

told him that if he were a foot taller he'd knock his block off. Musto

kept arguing, since he knew he wasn't growing any. Crouch went back on

his word, and swung at him anyway. After the two men were separated,

Crouch calmed down and offered to buy Musto a drink. Musto says

they're friends to this day. Then there's what happened to Guy Trebay,

whom Crouch stalked through the Voice's old offices threatening to

kill him, relenting only after writer Hilton Als intervened. Another

time, writer Harry Allen approached Crouch, hoping to exchange some

notes on hip-hop. Instead Crouch, evidently in a bad mood, caught

Allen's neck in the cobra clutch, prompting the Voice to give Crouch

his walking papers.

By then the Hanging Judge had secured his rep as king of the literal

literary brawlers—an accolade that ranks right up there with prettiest

journalist. Really now, administering beat-downs to pencil-necked

critics is about as macho as spousal abuse, croquet—or gangsta rap.

Much like the acts he derides, Crouch has a taste for swinging that is

nothing short of a variation on the "I ain't no punk" theme seemingly

encoded on the DNA of all black males. "I have a kind of Mailer-esque

reaction to the way some people view writers," Crouch once told The

New Yorker. "I want them to know that just because I write doesn't

mean I can't also fight." Put another way, Crouch wants you know he

keeps it gangsta.

"People perceive writers as being soft and not assertive. And there is

a legacy of writers, going back to Hemingway, asserting their

masculinity in an overt way," says George. "Maybe it gives Stanley

personal satisfaction, but I don't think it's necessary. This is

something you'd expect from a rapper in The Source's office because

they got three mics in a review."

Crouch's street mojo also adds another layer of mystique, particularly

for his white fans. His brand of withering attacks against black

nationalism and the black left would normally open the assailant to

essentialist charges about his "blackness." But to the frustration of

his targets, Crouch is the real deal for the Tina Brown set. From his

jazz criticism, to his folksy Southern lilt, down to his willingness

invoke the ghost of Joe Louis, Crouch always manages to sound like his

ghetto pass is at the ready.

Even if in his writing Crouch derides the ethics of the street, his

actions close the distance between him and the gangsta rappers he

abhors, making cartoons of them all. Both could live without the

electric slide, whop, or moonwalk. Both could give up the cross-over

and dunk.

But never let it be said that he who purports to be a black male gives

up the beast. That it's all an act, and he really won't kick your ass.

That in the middle of politicking over Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and tea,

he won't go David Banner, upturn your table of crumpets and

coffee-cake, grab you by the collar, drag you out into the darkest

alley, and show you that, yes, what you have heard is true. That he

will not swing through on his dick and snatch your Jane on a vine like

Tarzan. Never let it be said that Jim Brown was not the essence of

him. Never let it be said that he—whether Crip or Crouch—failed to be

a nigga.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0430/coates.php

===============

Mike

[bertrand]

Peter Watrous - there's a name I haven't heard in a while, and I'm none the worse for it.

Bertrand.

[Leeway]

Is there some reason why none of these folks (or their friends) have not taken a good swing at Stanley? I mean, one good slap deserves another.

[7/4]

Got me.

He slapped him. WTF? He slapped him?

He slapped him?

[Larry Kart]

Why is it that so many seemingly critical pieces about Crouch, such as this new Village Voice piece, are compelled to give away the store? "[O]ne of the great essayists

of his generation"? As Chris pointed out at the start of this thread, Crouch "is a terrible writer."

[Chuck Nessa]

A funny thing - at least to me. I have never met SC, never wrote him, never called him. BUT over the years he's found it necessary to call me and "explain his views" and sometimes say he's not against this or that. Does he not want me to feel negatively towards him? WTF!

I'll never forget his call around 1982 when he called and said something like "I know I been ripping your boys but I was at one of Roscoe's rehearsals (this would probably be the Sound Ensemble) and he had them kicking ass".

[JSngry]

I'll never forget his call around 1982 when he called and said something like "I know I been ripping your boys but I was at one of Roscoe's rehearsals (this would probably be the Sound Ensemble) and he had them kicking ass".

I hope you stuck your fist up in the phone and smacked his ugly ass back around the block!

[Larry Kart]

I had one -- but only one -- of those phone calls, too. Stanley was in the Chicago area for a while in the mid-'80s I think it was, working on a book at a suburban writers retreat, the Ragdale Foundation, when he called me out of the blue at the Chicago Tribune to shmooze (or so it seemed). He rattled on a bit, then suddenly said something (in an expansive "guys like you and me who know what's what" manner) about Lester Bowie not being able to play the trumpet, then tried to zoom right on to something else. I said, "Wait a minute" (or words to that effect), "just want to make sure you understand that I don't agree with you about that." Maybe ten seconds later he rang off.

[JSngry]

I hope you stuck your foot all up in the phone and kicked his ignunt ass all the way back to Stupidville, Ohio!

[chris olivarez]

Stupidville Ohio?

[JSngry]

That's not how you spell it?

[chris olivarez]

You're fine but Crouch might not be once he finds out he's been exiled to Stupidville.

[DTMX]

Stanley Crouch Gets His Comeuppance Via Sam Rivers (27 years ago)

From some writings on the New York Loft Jazz scene by Eugene Chadbourne:

What some considered the death knell of the loft jazz scene came in the Summer of 1977, which found Sam Rivers and Stanley Crouch organizing festivals scheduled for the same time, on the same street. Rivers noticed that many of the same musicians he was presenting were advertised for Crouch's surprise event, and delivered an ultimatum that anyone participating in Crouch's festival would be cancelled from Rivbea. Since Crouch's was strictly a door-money deal (no guarantees), many musicians bowed out of Crouch's festival. At least one musician opted for Rivbea, not because of the ultimatum, but upon learning of plans to tape his show & possibly make a record (without working out pay for the musicians who'd be recorded). Tensions heightened, and finally climaxed on the streets of Soho when a fight broke out, and Sam Rivers purportedly delivered a "smooth uppercut" to the competition; an event that some believe to be the source of Crouch's dislike of avant-garde jazz.

[Big Al]

All the more reason to love Sam Rivers!

[Christiern]

I always knew that my admiration for Sam Rivers went beyond his music.

BTW Does anyone know if Stanley ever returned to Lois' lap at Jazz Corner?

[Rooster_Ties]

All the more reason to love Sam Rivers!

No shit!!!

I heard Crouch speak back in February, in person, as a part of a panel discussion at Washington University (in St. Louis). It was a round-table discussion about "Public intellectuals". All the other participants were academics (here's who was there, about 6 total), except Crouch, obviously. He was outgunned, intellectually, to say the least (who wouldn't be) -- but my problem with Crouch was that much of what he said was basically nonsense (wish I could remember some details), and that he sure as hell liked to hear himself talk.

Well, one thing I do remember...

Crouch, in one of his many tangents that really didn't have much to do with the discussion that was going on around him, make a perfectly reasonable argument for why Miles should have gone electric (in fact, maybe even "needed" to go electric), and why Sun Ra and Coltrane, and other free-jazz artists, were perfectly reasonable to go down the "Free" paths they went.

No, Crouch never mentioned jazz specifically, but he mentioned a number of authors, including Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac, and J.D. Salinger (and maybe one or two others), and how they were all justified, no -- more like obligated -- to try new things, to go where no author had gone before, even if it meant pissing off the majority of critics and the public alike. His implication was that the public just needed to catch up with them. Crouch actually said something like "artistic expression that doesn't move forward, just withers on the vine" -- or something like that.

Of course, this was a total disingenuous argument, when you consider Crouch's conservative opinions about jazz. I about nearly fell out of my seat, and it was all I could do not to bust up laughing in fairly large hall full of students and faculty, and other public, semi-public, and private "intellectuals".

The sense I got, from this event, was that Crouch was mostly full of shit. Not entirely, but mostly.

Edited December 2, 2004 by Rooster_Ties

[Rooster_Ties]

Doing a search just now (for something else), I stumbled on this thread (link below), which I don't remember having read all the way through at the time.

Link: The latest Crouch controversy, pile on!

This post by Chris (the two articles/letters it contains) is well worth a read, and I'm sorry I missed it the first time. (Thanks for posting it, Chris!!)

Edited December 2, 2004 by Rooster_Ties