Forget all this talk about the death of print media for a moment. Tomorrow a newspaper is born in San Francisco. Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, old-fashioned broadsheet — the San Francisco Panorama. Its pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. Here’s what this beautiful beast will cover: “It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.”
Exciting and ambitious for an 11-year-old literary journal, right? That’s why we sat down with Oscar Villalon, McSweeney’s publisher, to get the back story on the project.
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It’s been a rough time of it lately for gays. First Adam Lambert loses American Idol by a wide margin to that other guy. And now the California Supreme Court has decided to uphold the Prop 8 same-sex marriage ban. Luckily for Ellen and Portia and our friend Andrew Sean Greer, the 18,000 marriages performed before the ban will remain valid. Everyone else will have to move to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, or Vermont come September (or get married in one of those states and then move to New York, where marriages performed elsewhere are currently recognized) if they want to gay marry it up. Blargh. The whole thing makes us feel extremely depressed and negative. Do you think this would have happened if Harvey Milk was still alive? This is even more depressing than the final episode of WAG.
Andrew Sean Greer — whose The Story Of A Marriage is like Edith Wharton meets Melrose Place when it was at its peak — was sitting in Central Park outside of the Met stalking a squirrel with a giant peanut and a big blond mustache when we caught up with him. He’s reading with Amanda Eyre Ward tonight in Williamsburg as part of the Pete’s Reading Series. “Amanda and I were best friends in grad school in Montana,” he explains. “For both of us, it was life changing. We didn’t have any writer friends, and suddenly we were in this strange world in the mountains, where all anyone did was talk about writing and reading. We’ve read each other’s stuff and encouraged one another from the start.” After the jump Greer chats with us about mastering the art of the plot twist, obsessing over generations past, and dealing with the fact that we never really know the ones we love. Read More »
