Sean Penn’s forthcoming debut novel, has already made headlines fo🎶r its protagonist, a clear stand-in for Penn, calling for the assassination of a Trump-like president — t✤his, from an author who has defended such dictators as Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro.
Penn, writing as Honey, also ass♐ails the #MeToo movement as “a toddlers’ [sic] cr🦄usade” and “a platform for accusation impunity.” is familiar with his own alleged issues with women.
Yet lost amid such provocations — a crude but smart attempt to generate outrage on the left and ♐the right — is the real travesty.
Sean Penn got paid to write a book.
I got an advance copy weeks ago and struggled with it. It’s truly unreadable. Penn’s thesis — spoiler alert! — is little more than America as cesspool, an always-welcome observation from a movie star made obscenely wealthy by the economic and class structure he assails. As for writing style, Penn doesn’t have one; instead, he’s on a mission to prove he knows lots of words. Take this line, meant to explain Bob’s relief at waking up without his ex-wife: “Ah, but when these considerations tickle the tumu𓆏lt of actionability, only then does he relinquish their delicious danger, and find himself buoyantly liberated to move away from the definitively empty bed.”
That’s only page 10.
Penn is hardly the first celebrity to use publishing as a back door to intellectual bona fides. The Big Bang was September 1🐬995, when JFK Jr. — then 34 years old and best known as People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” — leveraged his fame to launch his political magazine, George. Despite no journalistic experience, he appointed himself editor-in-chief. After an initial burst of public curiosity, the ꦯmagazine flailed.
Kennedy, once famously private, was desperate to make George a success and went about it the only way he knew how. He posed naked and broke family code, excoriating two cousins as “poster boys for ba💛d behavior” in his editor’s letter. He had Drew Barrymore pose, on the cover, as his father’s mistress Marilyn Monroe — the mistr൩ess who perhaps caused his mother, Jackie, the most heartache. He went on Oprah, Larry King and Howard Stern. Nothing worked.
Decades later, celebrities still take Kennedy’s hubris as encouraging♍ rather than cautionary. And, real🉐ly, who can blame them?
Movie stardom has been subsumed by comic-book franchises and reality TV and the Internet. That kind of fame 𒆙♔no longer carries the cultural weight it once did. It probably never will again.
‘I don’t even know what my grades are in NYU because grades don’t matter’
- James Franco
So what makes a celebrity different? Intellect. And what connotes intellect more than a book deal? Or teaching gigs at prestigious universities? Or having an editor at The New York Times or The New Yorker on speed-dial? And these editors and institutions, struggling to cut through cultural nois🍬e, clearly hope some of this stardust will redound to their benefit.
So, when she’s not teaching at the London School of Economics, high-school dropout in the Times op-ed pages. Jesse Eisenberg and Lena Dunham h💖ave a friendly home for their subpar writings at The New Yorker.
Tom Hanks publishes short fiction in The New Yorker, then gets a book deal for📖 short fiction — hardly the most commercial genre — with a major publishing house. A drooling profile of Hanks as a legitimate author follows, again, in the Times. : “Were ꦆyou trying to be Chekovian?”
Sarah Jessica Parker has a new publishing imprint at Crown. Vogue, 🌱wﷺithout irony,
Actor, author, director, poet, visual artist and Gucci model James Franco claims to have simultaneously attended classes at Columbia University, NYU, Brooklyn College and Warren Wilson College as well as Yale and the Rhode Island School of Design. When his NYU acting teacher went public with Franco’s absence from class and his final grade — a D — Franco got defensive.
“I did not care one bit about the grade — I 🦩knew ꦗI was going to get the grade,” Franco said in 2012. “I don’t even know what my grades are in NYU because grades don’t matter.”
There you have it. Why study when you’ll g🧔et by on your celebrity?
By the way, one of the few writers to praise Penn’s book is Salman Rushdie — Salman Rushdie, forced into years of hiding by a fatwa, his l🐻ife at risk over a novel.
“Great fun to read,” Rushdie blurbed. He went on to say th♑at “Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson would love this book.”
More than any living a♌uthor, you’d think Rushdie would value the power of words𒅌. But Spicoli wrote a book.