New Crouch Book

[Dr. Rat]

Just reading this at lunch. The review struck me as kind of strange, not just in terms of the Seymour's tone vs. that of most folks around here, but in that this guy seems intersted in talking about Crouch on some basis that gets beyond his abrasiveness and physical/intellectual pugilism . . . but then he doesn't

This article can be found on the web at

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050516&s=seymour

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Crouching Tiger

by GENE SEYMOUR

[from the May 16, 2005 issue]

[desription of Crouch's recent bouts]

For those of us who prefer those aspects of Crouch's public persona that let him be urbane, trenchant and illuminating--as when, say, he's a principal talking head for Ken Burns's recent PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson--all this shoving and slapping around is an unseemly, egregious waste of his time and ours. Also, it's redundant. When Crouch is incensed about something, his lush, ripe prose morphs into a bludgeon, attacking with such quick, unrelenting force that its target is initially too dazed to strike back in kind. You'd think that would be enough to cut an intimidating figure on the cultural scene, and most times it is. But when you add to this gadfly's cluttered portfolio his mission to advance the increasingly quixotic cause of jazz music through his consultant's gig at Jazz at Lincoln Center (and you could stuff yards of column space itemizing the critical tussles involving Crouch on jazz aesthetics), you're tempted to believe that it's easier to haul a baby grand piano on your back from the Bronx to Brooklyn than it is to hold the full-time job of being Stanley Crouch.

. . . .

Whatever the case, it's past time for Crouch and his audience, pro and con, to broaden the parameters of their dialogue. Which is why The Artificial White Man is a sight for sore eyes. This is Crouch's best, most expansive collection of essays since his first, Notes of a Hanging Judge, published in 1990. . . .

The title of the new collection dares Crouch's baser critics to interpret it as self-description. But it's the subtitle, "Essays on Authenticity," that nails down the book's true purpose and brings into sharpest focus what Crouch, beneath the bluster, has really been up to all this time: investigating and challenging any and all notions of what is "authentic" in American life. And for "authentic" one could substitute "hip" or "bullshit-free" or whatever hip-hop euphemism enjoys the greatest currency at the moment. Media hoodoo and image politics may have helped Crouch become a celebrity. But he has never yielded in his distaste for superficiality. If you get him far enough away from the spotlight, it's even possible to hear Crouch call himself on his own bullshit. (When Hanging Judge's blunt candor is turned inward, it's easy to see why even some who disagree violently with his opinions find it hard to stay mad at him for very long.)

[Crouch's praise for John Singleton]

If it's possible for a commercial filmmaker to grow and reach for such depth and complexity, Crouch figures there's no excuse whatsoever for writers of books not to make similar leaps of conscience and consciousness. That's why the two most withering essays in Artificial White Man, "Segregated Fiction Blues" and the title essay, go medieval on authors who either evade or misuse America's cultural and ethnic complexity.

And, so we're clear, just because the volume on Crouch's customary rhetorical dynamics may be turned down a little in Artificial White Man, that doesn't mean the man always remembers to keep the restraints at hand:

Writers may well have gone to integrated colleges with all manner of people, some of whom have remained their friends over the years. They may live in neighborhoods populated with various kinds of Americans.... These writers may make it their business to associate themselves with at least one version of those organizations bent on chopping down more trees in the poison forest of ethnic, sexual, religious and class bigotry. Some of their best friends might be--you name it. But when they sit down to write about this big country, they punk out....

 That is now the norm: punking out. Hiding under the bed. Walking beneath a flag of white underwear stained fully yellow by liquefied fear....

At which point, the reader will be tempted to shout, "Awww, man! Why'd you have to go there? You were doing fine up till then." This isn't the last time the stained-yellow underwear comes up, and it's at such points and others strewn throughout the book that one's threshold for Crouch's freewheeling attack gets pressed to the breaking point. Still, when Crouch is focused on the task at hand, especially in the title essay's slow-hand evisceration of David Shields's Black Planet, it is fearsomely thrilling to behold.

To Crouch, Shields's highly subjective account of the 1994-95 Seattle SuperSonics season constitutes one of the bad things that happen when good writers grasp for authenticity or, as Crouch sees it, the notion of "being--or not being--what [shields] calls 'cool.'" Reading Shields confess his fascination, from his relatively secure, petit-bourgeois white standpoint, with flamboyant, often belligerent and wealthy black basketball superstars like Gary Payton, Crouch finds that Shields is avoiding, far more than confronting, his own bullshit.

As far as Shields is concerned, Crouch writes:

The black American's greatest refinements are expressed not in medicine, science, education, the arts and technology, but in shorts, tennis shoes and a sleeveless jersey, "talking trash" on the polished hardwood of a basketball court, sort of a flattened bush where primordial updates are available to the eye. Shields attacks this tendency in himself and others to reduce black men to athletic flesh held in place by the meat hooks of Caucasian projections. But, like a blacksmith addicted to making the same form over and over, he continues to forge new meat hooks and hoist these men into place.

You probably have to read both the "Artificial White Man" essay and "Blues in More Than One Color: The Films of Quentin Tarantino" more than once to figure out why Crouch thinks Tarantino is a lot "cooler"--more authentic?--in his engagement with the black psyche than Shields. The Tarantino essay does cover a lot of real estate. (It's a raw, rambling and altogether remarkable virtuoso solo that started out, Crouch writes, as a letter responding to Daniel Mendelsohn's dismissal of Tarantino's Kill Bill in The New York Review of Books.) It might help to skip ahead to the part of the essay that deals with Tarantino's overlooked Jackie Brown (1997), which gets its most thorough and incisive appreciation in these pages. Crouch correctly sees that what had been hyped and is still seen in some quarters as Tarantino's homage to the "blaxploitation" movies of the 1970s was in fact a sly, humane subversion of those knockabout thrillers. Crouch's swaggering belligerence may sell tickets to the chattering classes. But critics should always be judged finally on what and how they love. And in the Tarantino essay and his appreciations elsewhere in the book of Jorge Luis Borges, Danzy Senna, Saul Bellow and ZZ Packer, his enthusiastic passion feels so genuine that it further diminishes the things and trends he despises.