Crouch's New Book: The Artificial White Man

[Brad]

So I'm opening up Sunday's NYT Book Review section (we get the Sunday sections on Saturday) and whose visage is looking back at me but Stanley. The review by Emily Eakin, a New Yorker staff writer, of his book of essays is not kind. I know I'm taking this out of context probably but here are some snippets:

"Crouch encourages us to think of his essay as musical improvisations, writing as jazz. On paper, however, the effect is often cacophany. Unencumbered by conventions of logic and usage, he splatters the page with great gobs of vivid but impenetrable pose, awash in mixed metaphors and murky generalizations."

"Equally damaging of an author of such fiercely humanist instincts is Crouch's penchant for scatological conceits."

She concludes by saying that "Crouch is too smart and too original a thinker not to be held to the same high standards for which he has relentlessly agitated."

It's safe that this is one review he won't be saving.

[JSngry]

"Crouch encourages us to think of his essay as musical improvisations, writing as jazz. On paper, however, the effect is often cacophany. Unencumbered by conventions of logic and usage, he splatters the page with great gobs of vivid but impenetrable pose, awash in mixed metaphors and murky generalizations."

Sounds like Stanley's writing strikes the reviewer much the same way that so much "free jazz" allegedly strikes Stanley.

Oh, the irony. The sweet, SWEET irony!

[7/4]

January 16, 2005

'The Artificial White Man': Battling Gangstas and Hussies

By EMILY EAKIN

THE ARTIFICIAL WHITE MAN

Essays on Authenticity.

By Stanley Crouch.

244 pp. Basic Civitas Books. $24.

REVIEWING a book by Stanley Crouch can be risky business. In July, Crouch caused a minor sensation when he slapped the critic Dale Peck in a West Village restaurant, apparently for that very deed. Peck, a specialist in literary demolition, had savaged Crouch's novel, ''Don't the Moon Look Lonesome,'' in The New Republic, calling it -- among other unflattering descriptions -- ''a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed and put forward in bad faith.''

No doubt there are writers who applauded Crouch's response, seeing in it just retribution for the sins of an entire profession: Take that, critics, you arrogant oafs! But whatever one thinks of his tactics (and this was not the first time he had gotten physical to settle a score), they are, like his unvarnished prose, hard to square with his high-minded intellectual concerns.

A veteran essayist and jazz critic and also a columnist for The Daily News, Crouch presents himself as a man on a civilizing mission, combating the coarseness, vacuity, crude stereotypes and ethnic groupthink of American culture. He has exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the Afrocentrist Leonard Jeffries, deplored the separatist politics of Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X and ridiculed Toni Morrison's novels as ''maudlin ideological commercials.'' Among his current bugaboos is rap music. ''Images of black youth seen on MTV, BET or VH1,'' he writes in ''The Artificial White Man,'' his latest collection of essays, ''are not far removed from those D. W. Griffith used in 'Birth of a Nation,' where Reconstruction Negroes were depicted as bullying, hedonistic buffoons ever ready to bloody somebody.''

Disgusted by the ''gold teeth, drop-down pants and tasteless jewelry'' in a video for Trick Daddy's ''I'm a Thug,'' and the ''fast-tailed hussy, rolling her rump,'' in one by Missy Elliott, Crouch declares rap ''the new minstrelsy,'' adding that if white music producers dreamed up such spectacles, they ''would be run off the planet.''

Such pronouncements, directed often but not exclusively at fellow African-Americans, have earned Crouch a reputation as a cultural conservative, a designation borne out by many of the remarks in ''The Artificial White Man.'' He bemoans the mindless elevation by whites and blacks alike of urban street mores -- what he calls ''the bottom'' -- to the epitome of cool and worries about the implications for a struggling black population: ''This redefinition of black authenticity all the way downward . . . is a new kind of American decadence excused by many Negroes because of the money it makes for a handful of black polluters, onstage and offstage,'' he complains. ''The crudest, most irresponsible vision of materialism is fused to a naive sense of how far one can go in the world even if illiterate and unskilled.''

In a similar vein, he laments the idolization of badly behaving N.B.A. superstars and the spread of anti-intellectualism (''the greatest crisis that has ever faced the black community is the present disengagement from the world of education''). And in a long, meandering essay on Quentin Tarantino, the director of ''Pulp Fiction'' and the ''Kill Bill'' epic, he praises the filmmaker as a moralist intent on debunking popular culture's romanticization of violent crime. ''Tarantino takes off the rose-colored pop glasses,'' he writes. ''There is no vitality to the rebel if he is merely a narcissistic criminal whose only power arrives through lying, cheating and savage disregard for the humanity of others.'' He also admires Tarantino's melting-pot style -- his ethnically varied characters and liberal borrowings from culturally diverse cinematic traditions. ''No one,'' Crouch writes, ''understands better than he the many miscegenations that make our modern world the unprecedented thing that it is.''

Many of these ideas deserve serious consideration. Which is why it is frustrating that so frequently they must be extracted from writing that is sloppy, imprecise and crude. Crouch encourages us to think of his essays as musical improvisations, writing as jazz. On paper, however, the effect is often cacophony. Unencumbered by conventions of logic and usage, he splatters the page with great gobs of vivid but impenetrable prose, awash in mixed metaphors and murky generalizations. ''Our country is some kind of a mongrel that is spiritually a chameleon but always remains a bastard,'' he writes with typically cryptic bravado. And later: ''There are very complex relationships between xenophobia and visions of identity that arrive across our national lives and show themselves up as versions of dilemmas and victories. As we examine these relationships, we see things that have international implications, that demand a maturity when we scrutinize the heritage of Western literature, that call on us to cut through the Gordian knots of cross-influences, and that provide us with models from our own literary history that we can use to build our own ships and take sail on the blues-dark sea of experience.'' Huh?

EQUALLY damning for an author of such fiercely humanist instincts is Crouch's penchant for scatological conceits. In what may be the most cogently argued essay in the book, a piece on American ''literary segregation,'' he accuses writers of being too fearful to attempt characters who don't share their ethnic, religious or class backgrounds. ''That is now the norm,'' he fumes. ''Punking out. Hiding under the bed. Walking beneath a flag of white underwear stained fully yellow by liquefied fear.'' And what to make of an author who rages against rap music's ''dehumanization'' and ''fascination with the primitive'' but who devotes several pages in the middle of his essay on Tarantino to a comparative history of the sexual practices of white and black women and who seems to relish sentences like ''The slut chic of Madonna is another way of pushing everything other than one's own appetites -- or pretended appetites -- into a heated tub of excrement''?

Crouch is too smart and too original a thinker not to be held to the same high standards for which he has relentlessly agitated.

Emily Eakin is on the staff of The New Yorker.

[couw]

It's safe that this is one review he won't be saving.

did he hit her already?

[7/4]

It's safe that this is one review he won't be saving.

did he hit her already?

She better be watching her back.

[Leeway]

Could there be a worse job than being Couch's editor?

[Big Al]

Could there be a worse job than being Couch's editor?

His lover?

[Christiern]

Could there be a worse job than being Couch's editor?

His lover?

The very though is revolting--like something one sees on the culinary segments of Fear Factor.

[Big Al]

Could there be a worse job than being Couch's editor?

His lover?

The very though is revolting--like something one sees on the culinary segments of Fear Factor.

Well, I do my best! B-)