Lord save us from the minimal ass-piss of Sean Penn’s literary genius

March 27, 2018 1:31 PM

Sean Penn The Novelist Must Be Stopped [Claire Fallon, Huffington Post]

It doesn’t seem quite possible that a human person wrote this mess. In part, this is because Penn has certain overwhelming tics that seem like the product of a flawed algorithm rather than a conscious choice. For example, alliteration. Penn’s penchant for alliteration is so marked that I wondered, at times, whether he thought it was a prerequisite of the novel form [...] A few samples:

“Bob’s boyhood essence set him up for a separation from time, synergy, and social mores, leading him to acts of indelicacy, wounding words, and woeful whimsy that he himself would come to dread.” ― page 12

“Silly questions of cherries saved served to sever any last impression Bob might have had of Spurley as a serious citizen.” ― page 94

“There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations.” ― page 125

"This prosodic feast culminates with a six-page epilogue poem, which delivers some heavy-handed insights on our current political moment. Here’s Penn on #MeToo:

Though warrior women
Bravely walk the walk,
Derivatives of disproportion
Draw heinous hypocrites
To their flock.
[....]
Where did all the laughs go?
Are you out there, Louis C.K.?
Once crucial conversations
Kept us on our toes;
Was it really in our interest
To trample Charlie Rose?
And what’s with this ‘Me Too’?
This infantilizing term of the day...
Is this a toddler’s crusade?
Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play?
A platform for accusation impunity?
Due process has lost its sheen?
But, fuck it, what me worry?
I’m a hero,
To Time Magazine!

Fuck."

posted by Atom Eyes (102 comments total)

Oh dear.
posted by carmicha at 1:37 PM on March 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

Jebus H. Hell, that’s some embarrassingly bad shit.
posted by darkstar at 1:37 PM on March 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

Is this a toddler’s crusade?

Ah yes, the age old tendency to compare women to children. Delightful.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 1:39 PM on March 27, 2018 [31 favorites]

that's all a huge tell for there being no real editor, right?
posted by thelonius at 1:40 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

trenchant triage of tactile terminations.

Movie Deal!
posted by sammyo at 1:42 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

So, so, so bad.
posted by mudpuppie at 1:42 PM on March 27, 2018

Alliterative assholes always annoy.
posted by w0mbat at 1:43 PM on March 27, 2018 [36 favorites]

I couldn't even get through the HuffPo article because so much of the BAD book text was in it.
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 1:44 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is quite possibly even worse than the novels I write about for a living.

On a positive note for Penn, though, this means that in about two hundred years or so, an intrepid English professor will devote a monograph to the work of Penn and his contemporaries ("Aspiring to the Bard: The Actor-Novelist in the Anthropocene").
posted by thomas j wise at 1:45 PM on March 27, 2018 [21 favorites]

And written out in longhand or dictated, he was on one of the sunday morning shows smoking like a steamship, done with acting and does not use a computer. Seemed like a nice guy just with way too much money and attention.
posted by sammyo at 1:46 PM on March 27, 2018

Reading this article, I had the same question I wondered about Morrissey's novel: do you think he wrote this for NaNoWriMo? Because it would explain a LOT -- the short length, the awful quality, even the publication date.
posted by rollick at 1:48 PM on March 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

Seemed like a nice guy just with way too much money and attention.

Nice guys don't dangle photographers off of balconies or hit their wives over the head with baseball bats.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:49 PM on March 27, 2018 [66 favorites]

Nice guys don't dangle photographers off of balconies or hit their wives over the head with baseball bats.

Or wish death by rectal cancer on their critics. Seriously, Sean Penn is a toxic, terrible human being who can fuck right off.
posted by the return of the thin white sock at 1:51 PM on March 27, 2018 [38 favorites]

He's a violent awful man and no one who isn't a white man would be allowed to keep on keeping on as long as he has. The best thing from this press tour so far is that he seems to want to quit dating. Although I'm sure he'll find another woman's life to try to ruin before too long.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 1:52 PM on March 27, 2018 [18 favorites]

If you're a guy who think Sean Penn is a nice guy, I suggest you pay more attention to what you consider nice and what you're willing to excuse.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 1:53 PM on March 27, 2018 [30 favorites]

If anyone needs a refresher on Sean Penn as a abusive shithead, I refer you to this episode of Karina Longworth's You Must Remember This podcast, part one of a two-parter about Madonna and her early attempts at Hollywood stardom.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:58 PM on March 27, 2018 [16 favorites]

When I was in college I got extremely drunk one night and wrote some unbearably pretentious free verse poems which I decided it would be hilarious to name for hockey players with some arcane connection to the poem. I think one was about the Iraq War, and maybe another was about a road trip or something. They were and are complete trash, so I pray that no one else ever read the LiveJournal post I made that night. I'm still confident they are significantly better than what Penn has done here both in terms of poetic art and explicit message, because holy shit is that bad.
posted by Copronymus at 2:00 PM on March 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

On a positive note for Penn, though, this means that in about two hundred years or so, an intrepid English professor will devote a monograph to the work of Penn and his contemporaries ("Aspiring to the Bard: The Actor-Novelist in the Anthropocene").

"Artist Aspirants: An Anthropocene Actor-Author Analysis"
posted by billjings at 2:00 PM on March 27, 2018 [16 favorites]

Cactus Fields, a Low-Cost Home for Assisted Senior Living, looms like a large khaki-colored brick isolated against a backdrop of distant ambient light. Its draped windows and solitary silhouette sit in a seemingly endless desert tableau. here it seems that the desert itself has been deserted.

This is just a really long entry in this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
posted by Nanukthedog at 2:03 PM on March 27, 2018 [12 favorites]

But he was so great in Bad Boys. No, not that one. The even worse one.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 2:03 PM on March 27, 2018

I'm still confident they are significantly better than what Penn has done here

Verse or it didn't happen.
posted by Fizz at 2:05 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oh my gods. This is...so much worse than I expected. It's so bad that it's affecting my ability write coherently. I don't even have a phrase at the ready to describe this confusing mix of laughter and rage that I'm feeling.
posted by desuetude at 2:17 PM on March 27, 2018 [15 favorites]

Verse or it didn't happen.

Aw hell, is this where I get to dig out my old poetry journals from the 80s?

Don’t make me get mah journals, y’all.
posted by darkstar at 2:18 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Don’t make me get mah journals, y’all.

*chants* jour-nals! jour-nals!
posted by the return of the thin white sock at 2:19 PM on March 27, 2018 [18 favorites]

I would love to see the editor's notes and feedback on this book.
I'm thinking something very Milo-Ish, only with fiction.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 2:21 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Alliterative assholes always annoy.

Christ, what an assonance.
posted by speicus at 2:22 PM on March 27, 2018 [23 favorites]

Oh my gods. This is...so much worse than I expected. It's so bad that it's affecting my ability write coherently.

Penn-typool
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:23 PM on March 27, 2018 [21 favorites]

Silly questions of cherries saved served to sever any last impression Bob might have had of Spurley as a serious citizen.

I actually like the rhythm and word choice here. I mean, irrespective of whether or not alliteration is a useful device in the moment, and I doubt that it was here, this is a pretty string of words.
posted by TypographicalError at 2:27 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

As a matter of fact, I just recently dug up some writings from my college years, stuff that I had forgotten was preserved. And you know what? It was great. No Nobel Prize for Literature, but it was damn well worthy of eyeballs and of the time of the reader, if I hadn't shoved it aside and believed it was nothing anyone would want to read. That I had to grow up, put aside poetry, be serious.

And here is Sean Penn -- like Morrissey, like any number of celebrity scribes before him or since* -- with the gall to assume that whatever he writes is worth reading, without so much as a workshop. (Although, God knows, he would be the worst possible reader for everyone else there.) He serves as another reminder that "foolish modesty lags behind, while brazen impudence goes forth and eats the pudding."

(Eleanor Brackenridge said that. She was a suffragist, and probably a racist and a whole lot of terrible things, but I expect she knew what she was talking about.)

----
* look I was a Goth and all but I am still mad at Tim Burton for writing a whole hardback poetry book and deciding that nobody cared about scansion anymore
posted by Countess Elena at 2:28 PM on March 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

this is a pretty string of words.

I am side-eyeing you so hard right now.
posted by mudpuppie at 2:30 PM on March 27, 2018 [17 favorites]

Lord, grant me the unearned confidence of a middle aged white man.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:44 PM on March 27, 2018 [65 favorites]

OK so Rushdie blurbed this book with: “I suspect that Thomas Pynchon ... would love this book”. I mean, I know you can’t just call him up, but dude is still alive. Kind of awkward to be putting words in his mouth.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:46 PM on March 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

OK so Rushdie blurbed this book with: “I suspect that Thomas Pynchon ... would love this book”. I mean, I know you can’t just call him up, but dude is still alive.

I think it is a fair assumption that Pynchon has not read, and will not read, this book.
posted by sninky-chan at 2:51 PM on March 27, 2018 [12 favorites]

Salman Rushdie blurbed it. Why?
posted by doctornemo at 2:51 PM on March 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

He’s decided the nobel prize ain’t gonna happen so he might as well have fun with all the other old celebrities.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:54 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Lordy, this is embarrassing dreck.
posted by lovecrafty at 2:55 PM on March 27, 2018

The cringe-worthy part is that he must've spent a lot of time working this out, and likely felt very proud of himself. Second edition could run an adjective stripper for an easy fix.
posted by Brian B. at 2:57 PM on March 27, 2018

All this said, I’m gonna start using “ass-piss”. I’m not sure how, but that’s a treasure too precious to ever let go.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:00 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Do we know for sure that Penn is not a Vogon?
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:00 PM on March 27, 2018 [27 favorites]

Don’t make me get mah journals, y’all.

*chants* jour-nals! jour-nals!



Trust me, it’s not pretty. Five books full of juvenile doggerel, self gratifying introspection, and maudlin Miltonic musings. On topics ranging from the Tien An Men Massacre to the passing of Jim Backus. (The man was a GIANT.)

I’ll spare you and share only two. The first from Jan 1989, when I was 21 and in grad school. The second from May 1991, shortly after a guy I had a major crush on graduated and went away.


A Chemist’s Checklist

Like quick little elves
I’ve mopped and I’ve swept
And dusted the shelves
Where the compounds are kept.

My glassware I’ve soaked,
Flask, beaker and jar,
And prodded and poked
At the F.T.I.R.

I flushed out the drybox,
The vacuum is fine,
I’ve regreased the stopcocks
And pumped down the line.

I’ve cut off the bleed
And filled up the traps.
(The pump oil may soon need
A changing, perhaps.)

I topped off the dewar
And cleaned out the hood.
The solvents are pure,
The stock bottles good.

I snacked while I shared
A new research plan,
Then back to my sample
And an N.M.R. scan.

I picked out the best
Of some crystals I grew;
To send for a test
I then bottled a few.

I melted the wax
And sealed off the cap,
No time to relax,
No time for a nap.

With all of this done,
I now may begin,
But the day now is finished,
It’s midnight again.

***


The Second Law

I suppose it’s inevitable,
That in a universe constantly expanding,
Lovers must eventually part.
posted by darkstar at 3:02 PM on March 27, 2018 [36 favorites]

I melted the wax
And sealed off the cap,
No time to relax,
No time for a nap.
With all of this done,
I'm ready for bed
The day now is finished,
I lik the bred
posted by mudpuppie at 3:08 PM on March 27, 2018 [26 favorites]

Mr. Penn, you are hereby banned from this poetry open-mic night and all others, verily unto Judgment Day and beyond.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:12 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

I lied, one more, from Oct 89...


A Wake-Up Call

Essayed to sleep and reconvene
A slumber deep and night serene,
But here you are upon this spot,
Though traveled far, you trouble not.
A silvered cup, or golden comb,
Or yapping pup, or happy home,
Or gentle breeze through waving grasses,
Or finding lost prescription glasses;
All of these bring joy, delight,
But none so much as you, tonight.
So sleep defer ‘til I’m alone
Then dream of her when she is gone.*


*(N.B.: I was still very much deep in the closet in my 20s, so all of my poetry coded males as females, in the event something should ever happen to me and my family found my journals.)
posted by darkstar at 3:18 PM on March 27, 2018 [13 favorites]

Countess Elena > * look I was a Goth and all but I am still mad at Tim Burton for writing a whole hardback poetry book and deciding that nobody cared about scansion anymore

oh god do you mean The Melancholy Death Of Oyster Boy, in which Tim Burton masturbates furiously over a well-thumbed copy of Amphigorey for a hundred and fifteen pages, and somehow manages to convince someone to publish it

uuuuggghhhhhhhhh
posted by egypturnash at 3:21 PM on March 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

Now I want to read some of your poetry, Countess Elena.

Even our worst has got to be better than Penn’s work. I say this is the thread to share the old work we all buried deep years ago, thinking it wasn’t good enough to be seen!

Break out the journals, y’all!
posted by darkstar at 3:22 PM on March 27, 2018

Alliterative assholes always annoy.

Hey!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 3:22 PM on March 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

There's Bad, So Bad It's Good and Get Me A Hammer I Wish To Induce Brain Damage In The Hope That Memories Of This Will Disappear.

Guess which category this falls into.
posted by tommasz at 3:23 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

OK so Rushdie blurbed this book with: “I suspect that Thomas Pynchon ... would love this book”. I mean, I know you can’t just call him up, but dude is still alive.

I think it is a fair assumption that Pynchon has not read, and will not read, this book.

It’s also a fair assumption that Rushdie has not read, and will not read, this book.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:33 PM on March 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

I think Michael, married to Aimee Mann, is the nice guy among the Penn Brothers. Chris is no longer with us.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:35 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Lots of musicians want to be actors, and even more actors want to be musicians, but not too many actors aspire to authorship, thank God. I'm sure there have been a few good memoirs out there that were actually written by actors rather than "told to" real authors, but have any actors proven to be good writers? This book is worse than I could have imagined in my most feverish Xanax withdrawal nattering nebbish nightmares.
posted by kozad at 3:38 PM on March 27, 2018

Break out the journals, y’all!

Hey now. Bad enough we have read the farts of Sean Penn. Let's not smell each others.
posted by Kafkaesque at 3:41 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

My previous attempts at poetastry were buried at a crossroads at midnight, after being thoroughly cremated and mixed with night soil.


that is one stinky crossroads, tell you what
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:49 PM on March 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

Ha, this reminds me of the time Sean Penn wrote an open letter to President Bush and when I complained on an email list of fellow ravers that surely Sean Penn could afford an editor I was soundly scolded for Not Being Supportive of a Liberal Voice. I didn't care, he's a shitty writer and his letter was bad.
posted by oneirodynia at 3:51 PM on March 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

darkstar:

I lied, one more, from Oct 89...

A Wake-Up Call

Essayed to sleep and reconvene

I mean, points for moxie. If your opening gambit is "essayed," that's pretty fuckin' bold.

*salutes*
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:51 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

* look I was a Goth and all but I am still mad at Tim Burton for writing a whole hardback poetry book and deciding that nobody cared about scansion anymore

There was also Nick Cave's brutal And the Ass Saw the Angel, a Southern Gothic that married occasionally evocative imagery and extreme weirdness with verrrrrrry tortured and inconsistently applied Southern dialect (the rendering of 'my' as 'mah' is egregious throughout) and some really ugly misogyny/abuse in the text.

“Silly questions of cherries saved served to sever any last impression Bob might have had of Spurley as a serious citizen.”

There are some really interesting sounds in this gobbledy-gook, but as prose... /shudders
posted by Existential Dread at 3:52 PM on March 27, 2018

have any actors proven to be good writers?

Hugh Laurie's novel The Gun Seller is pretty good. And Carrie Fisher wrote Postcards from the Edge, among other terrific books. I haven't read Ethan Hawke or Wil Wheaton at novel length, but they're not regarded as disasters from what I can tell. Amber Benson writes commercial fantasy, but it's perfectly respectable commercial fantasy. Not to mention the books produced by standup comics, if you think of them as actors.
posted by cgc373 at 3:57 PM on March 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

I mean, points for moxie. If your opening gambit is "essayed," that's pretty fuckin' bold.


Oh jeez, it got much more pretentious than that. I went through a Milton phase for most of 1990, and it severely infected my writing with ornate flourishes and allusions to Greek mythology.

It wasn’t until my Beat poetry phase a year later that cured me. Well, that, and the LSD...
posted by darkstar at 3:59 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was soundly scolded for Not Being Supportive of a Liberal Voice.
There are Liberal Voices and then there are Liberal Snorts, Screeches, Snarls, Bleats, Croaks and Squeals. Not all lower mammals are Right-Wingers.
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:01 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

have any actors proven to be good writers?

http://flavorwire.com/133477/10-actors-turned-literary-authors
posted by Brian B. at 4:02 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I read this with professional curiosity because I am quite sure that some member of the public will probably request that the library buy a copy if I don't organise to buy one (or more) already. I am now strongly considering regarding this as "self-published" and therefore in violation of our selection & collection development policy so that I don't have to waste taxpayers' money on this tripe.
posted by Athanassiel at 4:04 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

OK so Rushdie blurbed this book with: “I suspect that Thomas Pynchon ... would love this book”. I mean, I know you can’t just call him up, but dude is still alive.

It makes me wonder if Rushdie doesn't like Pynchon's work that much, and this is his idea of an insult.
posted by ga$money at 4:07 PM on March 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

have any actors proven to be good writers?

William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:08 PM on March 27, 2018 [15 favorites]

My favorite quote about Rushdie is from Marice Sendak, "That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable."
posted by Quack at 4:13 PM on March 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

have any actors proven to be good writers?

I haven't read him, but Joel Thomas Hynes has a decent-sized list of acting credits on IMDB, and his latest novel just won the top literary award in Canada.
posted by Beardman at 4:20 PM on March 27, 2018

Rushdie is on record (second-hand) as having been influenced by Pynchon. So he probably has a favorable view of his work.

But I rather like the notion of the sick burn masquerading as a compliment, personally, and would like to think Rushdie doesn’t actually think that mess was worth complimenting.
posted by darkstar at 4:20 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I enjoy a good bit of alliteration so I'm feeling a little attacked, but boy that's appalling writing.

(Was I the only one that quite liked darkstar's second poem? It's pretentious, but that pretentiousness works for it.)
posted by Merus at 4:21 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

We were warned, I tell you! (Previously)
posted by sylvanshine at 4:28 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thank you for asking, darkstar, and for posting! Mostly the stuff I found is prose, or poetry that I am going to polish up for the portfolio, but there were some good scraps:

Every step we take is stolen,
Every breath a bayonet,
Every stomach here is swollen,
Every room an oubliette.

or

Silk and lemon,
Ice and eye —
Who’s the sucker,
You or I?

I roundly encourage everybody to post something they have written that is better than what Penn wrote, even if it is only a grocery list with a particularly plaintive quality.

Quack, please tell me that's true. I know Sendak said whatever he liked.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:35 PM on March 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

have any actors proven to be good writers?

Oh! Also there is Stephen Fry, who is hit-or-miss and has issues with misogyny in his writing, but is absolutely a writer whose work stands on its own. His Making History gave me the horrors, and I never thought of time travel in the same way again.

Colin Firth wrote a fantastic short story called "The Department of Nothing," but if he's written more prose I don't know about it.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:43 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

His Making History gave me the horrors, and I never thought of time travel in the same way again.
Same here! I don't meet many people who've read it but it was formative for me.
posted by peacheater at 4:46 PM on March 27, 2018

As a little kid I LOVED The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews, plus it has the best title ever.
posted by nicebookrack at 5:03 PM on March 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

have any actors proven to be good writers?

BJ Novak has written, for real, a contemporary classic of children's literature (by "contemporary classic" I'm trying to indicate that it is a classic among books written in the past 10 or so years).

The caveat is that it's strictly a read-aloud book. But kids absolutely adore it.

He also wrote a very, very solid book of short stories. Don't read it if you're bored or annoyed by the trials and tribulations of privileged young people. But that's what like 75% of contemporary fiction published in the US is about, so within that framework it's a reasonably impressive collection.

Tina Fey's and Mindy Kaling's memoirs were both quite enjoyable and also were so much in-voice that I would be very surprised if they had any ghostwriting.

I guess these people are all technically actor/writers though.

Way back when I remember thinking Ethan Hawke's novel was surprisingly not-terrible.
posted by mrmurbles at 5:04 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Nice guys don't dangle photographers off of balconies

are we talking about paparazzi here? If so, I'm not so sure about this

or hit their wives over the head with baseball bats.

Or wish death by rectal cancer on their critics. Seriously, Sean Penn is a toxic, terrible human being who can fuck right off.

maybe something has changed since thirty plus years ago, maybe he's always been this way, but he's one of the few big deal celebs who had dealings with people I know and ... well, they only really had nice things to say about him. Courteous. Polite. Genuinely interested in what others had to say. And my mom's one of those people.

But it was a long time ago, in and around the making of the movie We're No Angels. Maybe he'd just gone all method and couldn't get out of character.
posted by philip-random at 5:16 PM on March 27, 2018

I'm glad your mom liked him, but his violent temper is well documented over decades.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 5:26 PM on March 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

All of this writing is helped if you read it in Spicoli's voice.
posted by Peter H at 5:31 PM on March 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

Just think of it as he's dancing like no one's watching. You wouldn't criticize someone for trying to dance would you?

I'm just not going to read it because I will probably not get it. Hard for me to judge.
posted by Increase at 5:37 PM on March 27, 2018

A tree was wasted on printing Penn's poor word choices, strung together with disdain for language and a smug delight in sounds with no resonance.

A tree. A beautiful tree.

Meanwhile, I work across the street from a glorious, 100+ year-old cherry blossom tree, bent into such a position that a slightly Daliesque support beam was required to maintain it. In about a week, winter will be truly over when this tree's dark and craggy branches are rich with blossoms, pink and perfect.

And then there is Penn, the human equivalent of a choking vine. Hell wouldn't have him.
posted by datawrangler at 5:39 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

have any actors proven to be good writers?

And John Cassavetes, for screenwriting.
posted by Brian B. at 5:48 PM on March 27, 2018

I was expecting that this would be pretty bad, but in an unsurprising way that would leave me a little disappointed, the implication being that I'd be satisfied if it were indeed surprisingly and superlatively bad, and so imagine the internal conflict I feel now that it turns it was in fact much more bad than I could have imagined and yet I feel terrible now just from having had those words inside my head.
posted by invitapriore at 5:51 PM on March 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

So this would be a 'thinks he's Arthur Miller, but he's not quite Dennis Miller' situation, yes?
posted by bartleby at 6:11 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

I won't try to defend Sean Penn's writing, or past bad behaviour, but his charity or foundation (I don't know how to classify it) J/P HRO ( http://jphro.org/ ) is doing a lot of good work in Haiti and has been there for the last 8 years.
posted by kingv at 6:15 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

have any actors proven to be good writers?

I read the book so long ago that I can't really comment on its good/badness, but The Other (written by Thomas Tryon) made for a properly unsettling movie.
posted by philip-random at 6:47 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

If anyone needs a refresher on Sean Penn as a abusive shithead

I know it was a pre-TMZ era, and therefore there don't seem to be any publicly available photos of an abused Madonna to stir up rage (oh who am I kidding, who would be enraged?) but I continue to marvel that Sean Penn gets <0.1% of the approbation directed at Chris Brown. (And I consider the approbation directed at Chris Brown insufficient.)
posted by ziggly at 6:58 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

> billjings:
"On a positive note for Penn, though, this means that in about two hundred years or so, an intrepid English professor will devote a monograph to the work of Penn and his contemporaries ("Aspiring to the Bard: The Actor-Novelist in the Anthropocene").

"Artist Aspirants: An Anthropocene Actor-Author Analysis""

Y'all REALLY didn't read the thing about that there alliteration, didcha?

carefully sounds very hillbilly to keep from being mistaken for a poet and lynched by this crowd.
posted by Samizdata at 7:03 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just watched the Colbert interview with him, and Sean Penn looks like an old, strung-out Grayson Allen.
posted by 4ster at 7:08 PM on March 27, 2018

Actors Louise Brooks, Alec Guinness, Stephen Fry and William Shakespeare have written excellent books. Steve Martin and Hugh Laurie have published enjoyable works of fiction. Musician Willy Vlautin (the brilliant Richmond Fontaine´s frontman) is a fine novelist.
posted by abakua at 7:16 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

please tell me that's true. I know Sendak said whatever he liked

true, that's from the same Guardian piece that quoted him on

Roald Dahl: "The cruelty in his books is off-putting. Scary guy. I know he's very popular but what's nice about this guy? He's dead, that's what's nice about him." Stephen King: "Bullshit." Gwyneth Paltrow: "I can't stand her."

he did not know how to be wrong.
posted by queenofbithynia at 8:25 PM on March 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

I roundly encourage everybody to post something they have written that is better than what Penn wrote, even if it is only a grocery list with a particularly plaintive quality.

I did once write a bad poem about writing bad poems, which I may later regret sharing here:

Backbyte

Raw information,
interconnection
in anticipation
of brain insurrection.

Synaptic velocity
committing atrocity:
masking a paucity
of mental audacity.

Cheap addiction,
poor depiction:
bleeding diction
like sordid fiction.
posted by walrus at 8:57 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

It could be worse. He could have released an album. Silver Lining ™
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 9:07 PM on March 27, 2018

@drjengunter asks her son to read from Penn's book...
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:21 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Nth the recommendation for Julie Andrews. I was a huge fan of The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles. Mandy was another childhood favorite.
posted by dancing_angel at 9:58 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

He's a human rendition of Vogon poetry, writing faux Vogon literature. The Singularity is upon us.
posted by dbiedny at 1:56 AM on March 28, 2018

Tina Fey's and Mindy Kaling's memoirs were both quite enjoyable and also were so much in-voice that I would be very surprised if they had any ghostwriting.

Amy Poehler's memoir Yes, Please is also good.
posted by like_neon at 2:10 AM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oh.

Oh my god.

I tried to read more than two sentences of Penn's book, and now I've forgotten the capital of North Dakota.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:37 AM on March 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

Interesting, the consensus that comedians generally do fine at writing books, whether they are standups or not (that includes Fry and Laurie). Maybe it's something about the intensive prose-crafting that is the center of their work?

I saw Penn on Colbert talking about the book and the interview was weirdly riveting. Maybe kind of like Uta Hagen used to say about having a cat onstage next to an actor: the cat will have everyone's rapt attention, because it is utterly natural and you don't know what it will do next

I will not tolerate any claims that Wil Wheaton is a decent writer, I am still mad that his blog got more popular than mine just because he was famous and wrote nostalgic claptrap about owning a Millenium Falcon as a kid

he doesn't make you want to stab your eyes out like Penn does, but his stuff is also dreck
posted by gusandrews at 6:32 AM on March 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Somehow this Pinky and the Brain clip feels like it applies...
posted by Nanukthedog at 6:51 AM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Penn's Bad Boys costar Ally Sheedy wrote a children's book that was published in 1975, when she was thirteen years old.

(So, technically I guess she wouldn't fall into this same category, since she's an author-turned-actor, not the other way around.)
posted by doctornecessiter at 6:52 AM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

but he's one of the few big deal celebs who had dealings with people I know and ... well, they only really had nice things to say about him. Courteous. Polite. Genuinely interested in what others had to say.

Every single person who did not live with my father found him to be charming, courteous, funny, interesting, polite, an all-around good guy. People STILL tell me how great he is when they've met him for the first or third or twentieth time.

But those of us who lived with him knew he was narcissistic and he hit us and told us we were no good.
posted by cooker girl at 10:07 AM on March 28, 2018 [27 favorites]

It’s llike watching a novel have a stroke
posted by brand-gnu at 6:22 AM on March 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

Celsius1414: "I think Michael, married to Aimee Mann, is the nice guy among the Penn Brothers."

It's no myth.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:59 PM on March 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yeah, but maybe she was just looking for someone to dance with.
posted by Existential Dread at 4:15 PM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

On the subject of actors who write: personally, I'm really enjoying Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks, and no less than Ann Patchett blurbed, "Reading Tom Hanks's Uncommon Type is like finding out that Alice Munro is also the greatest actress of our time."
posted by kristi at 2:14 PM on March 31, 2018