Gawker reports that Stanley Crouch’s response to one of Dale Peck’s critical hatchet jobs has transformed from homophobic insults into physical violence:
A little after two o’clock today, while novelist and book critic Dale Peck was lunching with the writer Linda Yablonsky at Tartine in the West Village, jazz critic/cultural commentator/novelist Stanley Crouch decided to introduce himself. (Peck had reviewed a novel of Crouch’s a few years back; in response to that review, Crouch told Salon that Peck was “a troubled queen.”)
At Tartine, Crouch shook Peck’s hand, then, as a follow-up, smacked him in the face, saying “if you ever did anything like that [presumably referring to the review] again, it’ll be much worse.”
Given that he told James Atlas last year that Peck is “a little guy” — and that the “review he wrote of my book was really about him…. Bitchiness is his version of macho” — you’ve gotta wonder if Crouch has been sitting at home on Saturday nights fantasizing about dragging that pansy-ass gay boy critic behind his car.
Is this New York City or Jasper, Texas?
Update: another perspective.
