Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, August 4–August 9

Plan ahead for the end of the month: the ORB Launchiversary on Thursday August 20 at 6pm at Eli’s Mile High Club is free for paying subscribers and the low low price of whatever you think we’re worth for everyone else. But that’s just a warm up for the Bather’s Library (BAY-thers LIE-brer-ee) Summer Symposium (keep your eye on that website for tickets!), which will start on Wednesday August 26 and feature sessions on ORB hobbyhorses like How Gertrude Stein’s career in Paris was paid for by Oakland street cars and What if Piedmont didn’t exist. It’s time to fix things according to the ORB calendar and Stop Waste has even more workshops you can go to work on repair all month. Make sure you get your shots for free in Berkeley before the viruses come knocking this fall and also it’s the National Night Out this week which makes us feel queasy because ACAB but also neighbors hanging out together is great as long as they aren’t acting like they do on Nextdoor. These are all the events planned at Nomadic Bookshop in August, in theatre Repossessed is playing one last weekend in a basement under a pizza place in Berkeley, Iphigenia In Splott is playing through 8/23 at Shotgun Players on Ashby—meanwhile over in the West Bay: Artists’ Television Access is playing weird things that are sort of like movies by Guy Debord for the next two weekends and featuring pioneering Black filmmaker Robert Townsend live and in person as artist in residence at CinemaSFbay this week only, alongside showings of his films (h/t Devon at SF Has [No] Culture for this one!) Keep leaving the house, take yourselves to where the book people are, and remember that there’s a big fucking difference between “building a community” and “building an audience.” Think web of lateral ties, not wheel circling a central axis: communities dream together, make together, fix together, and vibe report Oakland together. Show up for each other, even/especially when it’s inconvenient. -MS

Tuesday, August 4

Lake Merritt Public Stakeholder Meeting, 4pm, Oakland City Hall (Downtown). After the big fish kill in Lake Merritt in 2022 (mostly caused by too much piss in the bay as I recall) the cities around the bay are making plans to deal with all the nitrogen in our waste that feeds algae and sucks oxygen out of the water and smothers fish and which is getting worse with a warming climate. This is a meeting to talk about the plan to keep the lake healthy despite all that. [insta]

[West Bay Bonus Event Primus] Emil Wilson with Sophie Yanow—The Nightingales, 5:30pm, Book Passage Ferry Building (The Embarcadero). West Bay illustrator Emil Wilson (very important: no Y, not the translator who is also a meme) tells a true story about friendship, AIDS, and community care in the 1980s, with pomeranians. This debut graphic nonfiction book has a starred review from Kirkus, ecstatic blurbs from the bizarrely disparate authors Gregory Maguire, Mark Z. Danielewski, Sarah Waters, and Emma Donoghue, and was created by a guy who went to art school in his 50s. Sophie Yanow, who is much younger, joins. [book passage]

The Black Antifascist Tradition Discussion, 6pm, West Oakland Branch OPL (De Fremery). Read Chapters 2 & 3 of The Black Antifascist Tradition, looking at the global spread of Black anti-fascism through Pan-Africanism, embracing communism, and the impact of WWII. [OPL]

[West Bay Bonus Event Secundus] The Revolutionary Act of Repair, 6pm, KALW (FiDi). One thing that jumped out at me from Mullaney's How We Disappear was that "wear and tear" transformed from being a problem to fix into something to capitalize on with "planned obsolescence," made extreme in the development of single-use commodities. Fight against entropy, and bring your lamp that needs fixing, your unravelling hem, and talk about doing the work to repair with fixers Claire Bonham-Carter (that last name sounds familiar), Cindy Navarro, & Phoebe Schenker, and environment/waste/climate reporter Mary Catherine O’Connor. When you damage things, take responsibility and fix it. [KALW]

One Village, One Book, 6:30pm, Montclair Branch (The Hills). The book club that loves the Bay is going to read Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement by Suzanne Cope. The glamorous hats and leather jackets might have caught the media's attention (and the guns caught the cops'), but the biggest impact of the Panthers was the local care work done by some of the core women of the party: feeding the people. [OPL]

Andrew Sean Greer in conversation with Lucy Corin, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). Hear West Bay novelist who makes me laugh and cry Andrew Sean Greer for free, in conversation with fellow local writer Lucy Corin. [Pegasus]

The Oakland Bay Area: An Environmental History, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). A big, capacious history of two hundred plus years of environmental history post-colonization of our very altered Bay Area, presented tonight by two longtime local environmental activists named David. Technically the book is titled something slightly different, but that error has been corrected in this listing. [eventbrite]

Also: Begin and Grow Your Career in the Field of Education with Alameda County Office of Education at Online (The Internet)

Wednesday, August 5

Bay Nature Talk: Summer Fog in the Bay Area, 12 noon, Online (The Internet). Go into the cloud to understand fog, or "the marine layer" as atmospheric scientists like today's speaker Daniel Fernandez and California weather guy Bill insist on calling it. [Neon CRM]

Rooted & Written: Preserving Ancestral Knowledge as BIPOC Writers, 6pm, Book Society (College Ave). Bay Area authors Eirinie Carson, Sabina Khan-Ibarra, Rowena Leong Singer, and Grace Loh Prasad write and think about diaspora, lineage, and inheritance. What gets passed down, and how do you share it with audiences who are both within and outside that knowledge. [book society]

s.e. smith with Beth Winegarner: All My Dead Cats and Other Losses, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda). Starting with cats and widening the lens from there to community gatherings and rituals, NorCal writer and Flytrap co-founder s.e. smith helps us understand grief as "an ongoing shift in our relationship to the world." Whether you grieve a lost pet, a lost friend, a lost faith, a lost future, a lost love, a lost city — when you reckon finally with the fact that the hole left is permanent, that there's no-one coming to fill it, what do you you do to rebuild a life around that grief, and honor its impact after you've poured everything out of the whiskey bottles a few times over (my personal stages one two and three but smith will share some alternative processing methods). [eventbrite]

Also: Botanical Drawing at Local Economy (College Ave) / Anne M. Breedlove — Happy Campers: Crisscrossing North America on Two Bicycles. at Montclair Branch OPL (Montclair) / The Return of Y2K Skinny: Heroin Chic, Ozempic, & SkinnyTok at Drake's Brewing Company (San Leandro) / FLOATING TO SHORE Poetry Open Mic with Kira Lynne Allen at Night Heron (Downtown) / Conference: Bring Them Cheese! at Roses on Adeline (Berkeley) / The Berkeley Slam Feat. Bianca L. McGraw at The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley)

Thursday, August 6

Nuclear Abolition or Extinction: A Rally and Protest, 9am, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory-West Gate (Hot Side of the Hills). Mark the anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the national lab where Trump instructed scientists to start making nukes again. LLL is one of two locations in the entire US where nuclear weapons are designed. After speeches by peace activists, join a symbolic "die-in" on the road to block access to the lab with your still living body. [indybay.org]

Profs + Pints Alameda Creativity, 6pm, Alameda Science and Technology Park (Used to be a Peninsula). Draw deeply from wells of creativity and you might find yourself at a heady level of euphoric mania. Could lose you a starter wife and fuck up your life a little, but according to Dr. Sheri L. Johnson, expert in mood disorders' intersection with creativity, if that's what it takes to make great art, you're in good company (or bad, depending on your personal opinion of Byron, Hemingway, Lowell, et al). [Ticketleap]

[West Bay Bonus Event the Former] The Last Human Bear with author Greg Sarris and Kim Shuck, 6pm, Mechanics' Institute (FiDi). Greg Sarris (Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria), in conversation about his new novel The Last Human Bear with Kim Shuck (Cherokee Nation), called "lush and gripping" by Rebecca Solnit and inspired by the Native women elders who shaped Greg Sarris in his youth in Sonoma. A return to power and form by the acclaimed novelist. [eventbrite]

[West Bay Bonus Event the Middling] My Dinner with Andrew Sean Greer, 6pm, A Private Home (West Bay). Hear Andrew Sean Greer in the West Bay for expensive, but the money covers comes with dinner, wine, and a donation to Litquake, and YOU get to be the person in conversation. [litquake]

NINA LACOUR: Meet Me In The Garden, 6:30pm, Books Inc. (Alameda Used to Be A Peninsula). West Bay Author takes a bridge and/or tunnel and then another bridge and/or tunnel to get to Alameda and share her new novel Meet Me In The Garden, which takes us back to 1940s New Orleans to the Creole community and a close-knit family full of secrets, dreams, and journeys that end up in California. [eventbrite]

[West Bay Bonus Event The Latter] Kitchen Table, 7pm, Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission). Readers for this food and lit combo, crossover show are Adrienne Mitchell (food blogger and journalist), Joe Wadlington (writer, Happy Endings organizer, and drag queen), Samantha Stevens (poet; lover of trees and other queer things), James J. Siegel (poet, most recent book is the West Bay through a lavender-and-leather lens, The God of San Francisco), and Esperanza Cabrales (Xicana poet proud to put the B in LGBT). With Treat Street Pizza! [insta]

Also: Neighborhood Mixer at FM Smith Park (Cleveland Heights) / Job Seeker Social at Local Economy (College Ave) / Richie Unterberger: The Velvet Underground at Tally Ho Books (Piedmont Ave)

Friday, August 7

August Mending Circle, 12 noon, Oakland Asian Cultural Center (Chinatown). Friction is what leads to wear and tear, so why not get to the rub of it and fix the socks, jeans, jackets, and sweaters that your loving use has damaged. The group provides some materials, you provide the effort and the choice to take time to mend instead of toss. [OACC]

[West Bay Bonus Event And a One] Alley Poems, 4:45ish pm, Kerouac Alley (North Beach). Join Marthine and the small fierce few who poem on a First Friday afternoon to share words around a table in the last of the sunshine. Email msatris@gmail.com for a prompt if you want to write something new this week and share it. Or just come and listen. Moving up the hill to Golden Sardine at 6 for their reading. [insta]

Lit Nights at Xochi, 6pm, Cafe Xochi (Ivy Hill). Hang out with poets in Eastlake! Featuring host Mikey Gallagher, Quinn Rennerfeldt who lives in the West Bay and wonders how long a city block is in spider miles; Karla Khine who says "Be cool. Be early. Be unyielding"; May-Li Khoe who makes her life a work of art and writes like the DJ/dancer/designer/thrice-displaced migrant she is, and Oakland's Ha Kiet Chau who notices, "the city is not in shambles, / it is dressed in crimson and gold, / it is gutsy, it is resilient. /It is urging you to step outside again." So go! [insta]

Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Just in time for the Mondays-don't-exist version of the calendar! Readers are Oakland's beloved Lee Willow Trumpfheller, making poems from found texts and the wittiest wit that ever did wit; Oakland's Loisa Fenichell (published in The Iowa Review, The Georgia Review and probably other Reviews with states in their titles); and Ivan Sokolov who may or may not be the chess Grand Master: show up on the second floor of Tamarack to find out! [Tamarack]

[West Bay Bonus Event And a Two] Meeting New People with author Daniel M. Lavery and Tracy Clark-Flory, 6pm, Mechanics' Institute (FiDi). Join East Bay writers Daniel M. Lavery and Tracy Clark-Flory to find out what the protagonist of Lavery's new book Meeting New People will do now that she's burned through two marriages and nine best friends. What does it take to break bad habits of throwing people away like holey socks and what happens next for a mid-life woman trying to find a precious new shiny one more time? [eventbrite]

[West Bay Bonus Event And A One Two Three] First Friday Poets in North Beach, 6pm, Golden Sardine (North Beach). Poetry and riesling and sardines! Carlos Quinteros III, author of no books [yet] (listen to his poem "Stick Up" on KALW), Reuben Gelley Newman, author of one book (love this: "Forty queers congregating in the back room / Sappho fragments slicing the air like preserved lemon"), & Randall Mann, author of many books and who wants you to know, "The city lights are on / for us, to us, tonight." Marthine and the alley poets will see you there! [insta]

[West Bay Bonus Event Give Me a Break] The Cinema Must Be Destroyed: The Films of Guy Debord, 7pm, Artists’ Television Access (The Mission). You've been doing the dérive with Debord since the other week at Tamarack with The Reticular Society right, so you're ready to revolt with the guy who started 1968 in Paris and made some "tantalizingly inaccessible films." There are books to help you out, too. Starts four nights across two weekends of films. [City Lights]

Black August Film Friday Screening, 7pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Deep East). Black August is the celebration and honoring of revolutionary Black freedom fighters. Started at San Quentin, spreading throughout California prisons, this is a month that is homegrown, grassroots, and unapologetic. MLK Jr is in February — George Jackson is in August. Come see shorts I AM FREE NOW, YOU ARE FREE (about Philadelphia's MOVE and Mike and Debbie Africa), WHAT THESE WALLS WON'T HOLD (by Adamu Chan, made within and about San Quentin), and A NEW VOICE. Q&A with directors to follow. [eastside arts alliance]

White Light/Black Rain, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). Yesterday you lay down in the road in Livermore, today you lean back in your seats to hear stories from survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, in this film by Berkeley-based, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki. [bampfa]

Kwento Across Waters Open Mic Night, 7:30pm, Malaya Botanicals (Alameda The Temporary Island). Celebrate AAPI voices as they tell stories, speak their truth, and share poems. [insta]

Also: Travel Writers & Photographers Conference at Book Passage (Corte Madera) / OTP Luminaries: Marcus Gardley at Online (The Internet) / Friday Nights at OMCA with seiji oda at OMCA campus (The Lake)

Saturday, August 8

Last Shot Movie Screening, 10am, Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts (The Lake). A screening of a basketball movie Last Shot, followed by a chat with a basketball player named Baron Davis, and a basketball training session for the youth. Get those courtside seats. [ovationtix]

Glen Echo to Mosswood, 1:30pm, Oakland Peace Center (parking lot) (Adams Point). This walk with the Oakland Historical Society is hilly (need a book to explain why?) You'll see an old church, historic houses, staircases for when people walked a lot more, and the newly-built Mosswood Recreation Center with tour leaders Naomi Schiff & Linda Taylor. [humanitix]

[West Coast Bonus Event the First] An Archeology of Hoisanese Absenses Zine Release and Artist Talk, 2pm, Now Place SF (West Bay Chinatown). Now Place is doing such cool work as a small printer, publisher, bookseller, community space. An Archeology of Hoisanese Absenses emerges from Connie Liu's residency at Now Place. "Hoisanese, once the lingua franca of Chinese in America, is a language rich in onomatopoeia and colorful colloquial expressions. Primarily lived through speech rather than writing, there are common phrases in daily life that have no standardized Chinese written form." Honoring voices and language left out of official records, this zine is a speculative memorial and archive. [insta]

Rockridge Book Club, 3:30pm, Rockridge Branch OPL (Sparkling Shafter). In the neighborhood that used to be known as Lower Rockridge and before that as Shafter, they are following up reading Ezra Klein's YIMBY-coded Abundance with Malcolm Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point. As is to be expected. [OPL]

[West Bay Bonus Event the Second] Ecology of the Hood Reading, 4pm, Medicine for Nightmares (The Mission). Reggie Edmonds Vasquez launches their debut chapbook, Ecology of the Hood (Foglifter Press). Vasquez, who hosts the Berkeley Slam among other poetry events, and is from Richmond, explores the environmentalism of humans growing gardens together, finding liberation in growth, decay, and seasons that are turning. Oakland poet Nia Pearl, slam champ Baruch Porras-Hernandez, pocho poeta Josiah Luis Alderete, and first generation hijo de su ch!#g@$a madre Kevin Madrigal Galindo are the backing band today. [eventbrite]

Strike Debt Bay Area Book Group: Hayek's Bastards, 5pm, Location upon RSVP (Oakland, Somewhere). Read Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobadian, in a group, and learn about how the neoliberals birthed the alt-right and why the hell Curtis Yarvin lives in Berkeley. [indybay]

SEA/CHANGE, 6pm, Dream Farm Commons (Downtown). Who doesn't love a storefront gallery, but especially Dream Farm Commons. Art about movement and crossings will hold still in the main space, and dancing through migration in humans and birds in the Annex tonight only. Even the art that stands firm for now will migrate and move over the next few weeks. Come back, come back, follow the paths of memory and magnetism. [insta]

[West Bay Bonus Event the Third] Plant Body/Corpus Botanicum/植體 Zine Launch & Artist Talk, 7pm, Now Place (West Bay Chinatown). Stick around at Now Place all day and hear RCRC (Rei Camus/Ruichen) talk about her exploratory book, which combines text and black prints to create a garden of imaginary plants that grow from human bodies, pressing and pulling at the intersections of our animal and plant selves, our intersections, dependencies, likenesses, and loves. [insta]

Kapha & Its Kind + SPRINGTWIN + We Are Leaves, 7pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). Three bands who incorporate poetry into their music, in a bookstore. Make the lyric lyrical again. [Nomadic Books]

Also: Rare Plants & Animals of Oakland's Serpentine Prairies Talk & Tool Sharpening Pop-Up at The Watershed Nursery Coop (Richmond) / DON'T LOOK UNDER THE BED. at Lucky Break Studios (Fruitvale) / Discussion of the strike at C&H sugar refinery in Crockett with local union reps and Defend Negros Island campaign at Lower Grand Radio (Online)

Sunday, August 9

Laurel: Cherries, Dairies, and Bungalows, 9:30am, Laurel Art Garden (The Laurel District). As early as 1909, the orchards, dairies, and fields of Oakland were developed into streetcar neighborhoods, including The Laurel. "A level walk" — get the flavor of it from the ORB vibe report of the walking tour last year. [humanitix]

Community Dye Day — Yellows, 11am, Makeshift Center (Longfellow). Use favorite flavor flowers chamomile, coreopsis, and marigold, with iron for variance. Bring small, pre-mordanted fabric and start practicing using plants' chemical defenses to make your life pretty. [insta]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 2pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). A banger of a movie. Edited by legendary Bay Area local Walter Murch, adapted from Milan Kundera’s novel, Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche star, and it's set in Prague in the turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s, with much sex and love triangles and political intrigue. [bampfa]

Jazz on Sunday, 2:30pm, Golden Gate Branch OPL (San Pablo Corridor). Young musicians open the show, then at 4pm Grammy-winning musician Glen Pearson will play for everyone who gets sent into a new pleasure zone by jazz and blues plonked out on ivory keys. See you there! [OPL]

Improv Games for Beginners!, 3pm, Bushrod Park (Bushrod). I'll buy what North Oakland Anti-ICE Assembly is selling, that "improvisers make great organizers, and organizers make great improvisers!" Be flexible, be generous, make others the star, always say yes and build something imaginative, generative, and delightful together — lefties can be fun, we're saying. [the very offline North Oakland Anti-ICE Assembly]

A Community Reading: The Pope’s AI Encyclical, Large Language Mojitos, and Being Human Together, 5pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Chicago Pope is a fan of the White Sox, liberation theology, sticking it to Sam Altman, and skipping the TL;DR to read the whole post. Christ's representative on earth will appear in spiritus sancti only as the man in the hat himself, like a rock, remains Rome-bound, but some local people will be drinking the unsanctified blood of Christ in person and reading his words in English out loud in a circle — honestly, sounds more Prod than Taig to me (if this joke hasn't landed, read up on Luther, Calvinism, Anglicanism, Vatican II, The Troubles, Priestdaddy, and then ask me to explain at Eli's on 8/20 why I think it's very, very funny to gather a lay collective to read a Catholic text.) [luma]

Long Haul Infoshop's 33rd Birthday, 6pm, Long Haul (Berkeley). Hang out in the radical community center to celebrate 33 years of community and you might get lucky and overhear a couple volunteers having the same old argument over whether a pamphlet is ephemera or for the archive. [insta]

Also: Book Society: Wandering Book Club Angel Island Adventure and Take Me With You by Steven Rowley at Angel Island (The Bay)