Brace yourselves: our favorite homophobic writer Stanley Crouch just might be back and up to his old anger-management tricks. Beatrice writer Ron Hogan points out Crouch's fondness for stereotypes and name-dropping, which leads to a lengthy, slap-worthy comment, supposedly posted by the man himself, in response:

Mr Horgan [sic]
What exactly is it that you do well? Your obsession with me and my unfortunate encounter with another minor man like yourself, Dale Peck, seems to have made you incapable of actual assessment. I find it interesting that you, like that capital of blubber and resentment, Terry Teachout, are capable of never avoiding anything of substance in your scorn, which seems to almost always be about condescension upwards. Ad hominem will do, particularly when called out.

It would have been interesting if you had addressed any of the concerns in my africana.com interview, particularly about the narrow scope of most American fiction, which tends not to venture into worlds where people of varous ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds meet. Was I right or was I wrong? Are there other black female characters like Leeann and Cecelia in contemporary fiction, both of whom are highly refined and down home as the gutbucket itself? Was Charles Johnson wrong when he wrong of the novel that it is "a fresh vision, one that dares to take risks in the name of truth: a novel that brims over with engaging characters and observations of contemporary American ife that are so insightful they break the spell of racial ideologies and agitprop fiction that have too long distorted our understanding of what black (and American) literature can be." Is Johnson wrong? How would you know? You would have to read the novel to find that out.

Further, your citing of Michael Thelwell's review is a perfect example of your your trouble with intellectual diaper rash. I guess when you get itched up you gotta bitch at SOMEBODY. Thelwell is a doctrinaire black nationalist academic of West Indian origin who would, of course, be angry at my novel that doesn't buy into the idea that suffering oppression from white people anywhere makes all black people essentially the same. There are serious distinctions to be made, and, as far as I know, I am the only one who has consistently addressed them. Black Americans—unlike colonials who had no more than economic impact on the "mother countries"—were central to the forming of American culture. I think Constance Rourke and John A. Kowenhoven could help you understand the broad details of that, which I'm fairly sure that you don't. By the way, Thelwell and I are friends who disagree on almost everything about American culture and domestic or international politics. Thelwell himself told me how impressed he was by my fresh and accurate rendering of the range and complexity of Negro culture in the South, but that he did not intend for the review to be fair. Its purprose was to get revenge for what he considered my harsh and unfair commentary about the late work of James Baldwin. He might well deny it now, but he knows he said it.

Further, these professional haters of Western culture who take advantage of the tenure system in our academies provide perspectives that would be crushed if the West were at all like the Marxist countries and heroes they celebrate. No, dummy, I don't think they should be summarily fired; I just think they should be recognized for what they are. But that would be too much for a gossip website on which nothing of intellectual substance seems to ever appear, only the tone of knowing all but providing the reader with nothing. There is an old Negro saying about Jack the Bear, "making plenty of tracks but going nowhere."
-Stanley Crouch

Funnier Than Banana Peels, Though, Are Ethnic Stereotypes [Beatrice]