Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, September 1–September 6
ORB met the Bathers last week and we splashed around together, exchanging ideas about Gertrude Stein, the artistic war on Piedmont, and making local media by paying writers everything we’ve got and paying editors nothing at all (“we do it for the love of the game” was the answer to “what’s your five-year plan”). If you do know someone who wants to prevent us from selling out (we plan to sell out to advertisers in very short order, but only ones we’d promote for free anyway) by tossing us their trust fund, we now believe the only ethical consumption under capitalism is paying editors, it turns out. Then, as is the Bathers way, we saunaed, bay dipped, and jazzed with some very nice people who found ORB on flyers and spilled the tea on the sad aftermath of the poetry program at Mills during the sweat. Where did you go this weekend, what did you do? Tell us and then we’ll tell everyone what the vibes were like! We also enjoyed some beautiful sunsets, possibly colorized by distant wildfire smoke, and are planning to be everywhere, all the time, for all the books that are coming out every Tuesday from now until Thanksgiving. What are you excited to read? We’ve got a list of B’s we might R in the future but there’s also the ORB syllabus if you want to catch up on all the literature for/by/from/about O. Meanwhile, a musical at The New Parkway; meanwhile, an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy and brush painting; meanwhile French filmmaker Alice Diop is coming to town & gown with us. But then we get a break from all the laboring to remember it’s still summer next Monday, which can exist, but only as part of the weekend, just this once, so stretch it out with us.—MS, XL, AB, TC
Tuesday, September 1
[North Bay Bonus Event] David Perlis — Morning in Marin, 6pm, Book Passage (Corte Madera). Happy book birthday to a book by a guy who grew up in the wake of the counterculture and grew up to look back and say, How the hell did that all happen right here? Dave’s cultural history of the art, writing, music, and movies that came out of evolving scenes of people living on the artistic and personal edge looks seriously and playfully at the bohemian extravagances of Marin County. Cross a bridge and celebrate the day of publication back where it all started, in the foggy nooks and crannies of Mount Tam, and then drive back to where you can afford to live. [Book Passage]
The Black Studies Collective Community Reading and Discussion Series, 6pm, West Oakland Branch Library (DeFremery). The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen is the text, and Oakland coming together to discuss is the praxis. Third of four meetings. [OPL]
Floating to Shore: ONE YEAR!, 7pm, Night Heron (Downtown). Alie Jones has been bringing the people of Oakland together to share what’s in their mouths, minds, and hearts for one year: HURRAY for sustaining community spaces and keeping showing up! Tonight, features readers are Donté Clark (poet and performer from Richmond in Greater North Oakland), Lyn Patterson ("When I cannot tell where she/ ends and I begin and I lament / because I know I will have to peel / myself off of her skin"), and Melissa Charles + Tré Vernon, and YOU because this is an open mic after all. [insta]
Wednesday, September 2
Alex Tamkin | How People Use AI, and What It Does to Learning and Judgment, 12:10pm, Institute of Personality and Social Research (Cal). If you missed Lisa Dawn Colvin at Bather’s Library Summer Symposium reporting from 30 years as a linguist and philosopher in ontology research on "Cognitive Sovereignty in the age of GenAI," you could go hear the guy from Anthropic with a degree in machine learning talk about it today instead (or also). When a tech reporter who attended her talk asked when things in AI moved from exploratory and interesting into extractive, Lisa pointed to the moment when machine learning came into the space, though she did allow that writing parsers by hand was laborious and watching the algorithms work was faster. Save your brain from going smooth by doing things the hard way. [UC B]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Closer Reading, 5:30pm, CCA Campus Gallery (Dogpatch). What Is Book? We will keep asking until someone breaks and secrets are revealed. For one day only (and also as long as the exhibit is up), the book is not a mass market object reproducing a writer’s art on wood pulp, but a work of art unto itself. Vivian Sming (Sming Sming) makes publishing a collaborative art practice; Macy Chadwick (In Cahoots Press) swings toward fine art and hand-made craftmanship; and Kate Laster cuts her paper up to create individual works of text-based art. (Also Kate has a show up in Oakland through this weekend only if you want to stay East Bay!). [CCA]
Memories in Motion: Selected Stories of Mildred Howard, 6pm, Maude Fife Room (Cal). The documentary about the East Bay artist with a show up at OMCA right now was co-directed by her grandson MYL3Z who is also a mixed media maker of memory trained up alongside his grandmother in that practice of assemblage. After the screening, MYL3Z will be in conversation with Leigh Raiford and Irene Denise Ross about Black art and Black worlds. [UC B]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Joyce Tang & Soleil Ho Author Talk • Bake Sum: Asian American Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats, 6:30pm, Omnivore Books (Noe Valley). Bake Sum’s pandan milk buns and brown butter mochi bites are my kids’ favorite sweet treats, and Soleil is a fellow indie media renaissancer, so it’s all Oakland faves in the West Bay celebrating how culinary traditions roll around the globe and end up on Grand Avenue. [Omnivore Books]
Community Briefing, 7pm, Oakland Liberation Center (Deep East). A grassroots gathering of East Bay people against the genocide in Gaza is planning to bring a citizen’s motion to Oakland’s city government demanding divestment from Israel in a couple weeks. Come learn about the legislation and bring some food to share. [google doc]
Emile Chabal on Eric Hobsbawm, 7pm, Dwinelle (Cal). Emile Chabal shares the life of Eric Hobsbawm, Marxist historian and, for a while, jazz critic. Chabal’s intellectual history is the second biography of the scholar who started the rehabilitation of the Luddites and became a global celebrity Communist, all while despising blue jeans and Bob Dylan. [UC B]
The Berkeley Slam ft. Jaz Sufi, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). One thing I really like about poets here in the Bay is the blur between performance-based poetry and page-based poetry. We talked at the Bathers Symposium about how Gertrude Stein is a sound artist you best enjoy by listening and she’s avant garde as hell. Hieu Minh Nguyen (book release this week! See above!) is published in the fanciest lit mags you can think of and got his start on slam teams in Saint Paul. So come see the slammers, and listen to the guest of honor Jaz Sufi who says "Maybe I’ll always be lonely! Who knows what the summer will bring!" [eventbrite]
Rebel Kings Drag Show: IRL Doom Scrolling, TikTok Deep Dives, and More!, 9:30pm, White Horse Bar (The Trans-ition between Berkeley and Oakland). Drag kings enact the internet for you. Bring cash, or find out their OnlyFans and pony up. [insta]
Thursday, September 3
Opening: “Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations,” 4pm, Worth Ryder Art Gallery (Cal). "At the intersection of art and technology" is what’s getting all the grants that are left to scrabble over these days, so here is a whole art show on the hidden aspects of AI culture: extraction, hidden human labor, hallucinations. I am also delighted to report that an armistice has been reached and the Dept of German is organizing this in a collaboration between Berkeley and French universities, which I think is what we call “a Vichy.” [UC B]
Ivy Hill Neighborhood Mixer, 5pm, FM Smith Park (Eastlake). Get to know your neighbors Eastlake style in the park with statues of mules because borax built this city, or at least its light rail. [insta]
Sundial Reading Series 3: West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project edition, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). Poet Ben Gucciardi hosts prose, poetry, and community activism in the third instance of his reading series. Veronica Eady, from West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) will be there to speak to their work, and all ticket sales will go to the org. Readers are poet and goatherd Mukethe Kawinzi (listen in here to the incredible performer), novelist (Coyoteland) and forager (Uprooted)Vanessa Hua, and West Oakland Environmental Indicator Alexis Madrigal. Lauren Markham, author of Immemorial, will moderate! [luma]
Artist Talk - Grégory Chatonsky: INFRALLUCINATION, 6:30pm, Anthropology & Art Building (Cal). After the arty soiree, French-Canadian artist Grégory Chatonsky will explore how his future-speculating work has played with AI, especially its ability to create a shape that looks like sense but is full of nonsense, and other ideas that are very intriguing for artists but should really not be forced into every piece of software we have to interact with. [UC B]
Investigating Public Agencies and Institutions: A Crash Course, 6:30pm, Tamarack (Downtown). So you want to hold the city accountable: instead of reading Oakland Report, learn how to make a public records request, say of emails exchanged within your local library about a cancelled event, and also learn how much of what you’re looking for is not online and where else to find it. [BAFS]
David Perlis: MORNING IN MARIN, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore (Elmwood). Dave knows how to throw a party — his launch last weekend for this book at the legendary Record Plant recording studio was beyond dreamy and there were tacos — and he has written a party of a book. Zoom through the decades and the scenes that unfolded into greatness and don’t forget to go home with someone you didn’t come in with. Tonight only he brings that special sparkle to Berkeley! Have fun exploring the Marin mythos and contribute your own theories about the long shadow of Mount Tamalpais’s influence. [Mrs D’s]
Fungi Foraging with Dr. Gordon Walker (A Talk), 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). Get ready for mushroom season! Thanks to fog drip, the East Bay mushroom gossip is that chanterelles are already fruiting, but there are so many more fungi than those beloved golden nuggets of oak-loving goodness. Learn from Gordon about all the rest of the kingdom. Fun fact, not Stein related this time: the cell walls of mushrooms are made of chitin, like the shells of lobsters, so they’re more closely related to animals than to plants! [Pegasus]
Saint Omer, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Alice Diop will be present to talk about how she’s moved into narrative film from the documentaries that made her name, but unless you already got tickets, you will not be, because it’s sold out. Go to the website and find one of the screenings that’s not on this calendar—next week’s On Call or Danton’s Death—and you won’t regret it. [bampfa]
Also: One Village, One Book Reads Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement at Montclair Branch (The Hills)
Friday, September 4
[West Bay Bonus Event] Poetry in the Alley, 4:45ish pm, Kerouac Alley (North Beach). Marthine and friends will share some poems, listen to poems, and invite you to come to and read, listen, or verb a poem in some way we haven’t thought of yet. Read us something new or old—inspiration this week came from Summer Farah’s poems written to/for/from Etel Adnan in The Hungering Years and Matthew Zapruder’s chapbook How to Continue.
[West Bay Bonus Event The Next] First Fridays Reading, 6pm, Golden Sardine (North Beach). Always be book releasing! Next up: Preeti Vangani (Fifty Mothers from River River Books) who captures the way that life piles up more loss and yet you keep going & Marina Lazzara who says her book, The House Begins an Alphabet from Lithic Press “is a deep privacy: the necessary self in need of a collective,” which she will find tonight, because you’re coming, right? Lauren Parker will be opening the night with her work too!
Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Mallika Singh (poet, cook, farmer in New Mexico and interviewed the most wonderful poet-activist to grace this good earth Lupita Limon-Corralles for Protean so: good people), alma valdez-garcia (poet/landworker/educator ALSO living in New Mexico), Maura Modeya who is geographically basically Canadian but whose true homeland is Lesbos [poetry in the bay]
[North Bay Bonus Event] David Perlis: Morning in Marin, 7pm, Copperfield’s Books (Petaluma). Were you busy last night and regret the missed chance to reminisce, razz, or get Rumours-pilled with the youngest guy to ever write about Marin County’s mid-century? Dave will take you from lesbian poets through Zen drop outs, all the way to the big budgets and big egos of ’80s blockbusters. Why did it all happen here and why does it all matter? Drive through Marin and pop out in Petaluma to find out. [eventbrite]
We, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). This is already sold out, which is a bummer because Diop’s films are not always easy to see; I breathed them in on Mubi during the pandemic, and became a fan for life. She’s moved into more narrative film, but the way she explores entire lived ecosystems of humanity out of arbitrary slices like a train or a clinic or whatever else it may be is just [insert deserved hyperbole here]. Go to the website and find one of the screenings that’s not on this calendar—next week’s On Call or Danton’s Death—and you won’t regret it. [bampfa]
Also: Al Hinkle Centennial at Counterculture Museum (North Beach) / CROSSROADS 2026 - Program 1: coming and going / breath by breath at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (West Bay)
Saturday, September 5
Bioblitz in Dimond Park, 9:30am, Dimond Park (Sausal Creek Watershed). Have a bilingual day with El Timpano, Cal Academy, and all the other languages of your local nonhuman neighbors. Snap pics and help identify animals and plants in Dimond Canyon where, fun fact, Gertrude Stein and her siblings used to run around and play in the 1880s (so many fun Stein facts coming your way now, I regret to inform you). [insta]
WAITLIST 16th Street Station Interior Tours, 10am, 16th Street Station (West Oakland). Get on that waitlist or reach out to become a volunteer and skip the line: OHA wants to show off the fancy interiors of this historic train station, its role in the history of the Pullman Porters labor union, some empanadas (reason unknown), and you can tell your story of your own connection to the station in a recording booth. [humanitix]
Offline Navigation: Navigating without Networks and Phones, 1pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Claw back even more of your brain and get ready to be the one everyone turns to in the apocalypse because you know which cardinal direction East 580 actually goes through Oakland. [BAFS]
Ancestors Taught Me: The Great Camouflage, 1:30 pm, The Sanctuary (So Uptown it’s Almost Temescal). Join poet Amalee for a writing workshop rooted in Black surrealism and the consequent freedom of releasing the unconscious, deeply influenced by the writings and teachings of the Cesaires. [Google Doc]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Light Jacket Reading Series #27, 3pm, Portals of the Past (Golden Gate Park). Maura Modeya is in town and has a book to share and a light jacket to wear because it’s getting all brrr around here these days. It’s the time for book releases, so let’s celebrate them! Also reading alongside the poet exploring sapphic everything: poet a. avery, artist entangled with coyotes Helen Shewolfe Tseng, novelist entangled with the gothic Lauren C. Johnson, Megan Hurtado Bloom, and there will be some kind of magic show. [insta]
Breathless, 4:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). It is every bit as good as the most annoying cinéastes in your life insist it is. You’ve probably heard about the jump-cuts and other impudent flourishes, all now commonplace. So let’s spare a thought for Jean Seberg, cast here as the first of Godard’s too many treacherous bitches, magnificent opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo. She plays an American journalist abroad named Patricia, who can be found hawking the New York Herald Tribune up and down a Left Bank boulevard. In real life Seberg was a supporter of the Black Panther Party; for her troubles she was hounded to her death by the FBI, with an assist from the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. Godard’s movie is about—to the extent it’s “about” anything—loving and hating America and all its products, embodied in the movie by Seberg’s Patricia. In death, Seberg herself was proof that nobody hates Americans more than their cops. [bampfa]
Mean Streets, 7pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). Scorsese’s first feature with a major studio marked a major turning point in his filmography, Mean Streets established many of the central themes that he is now known for: 1. The profound role played by organized crime in shaping urban life in the United States, 2. The perpetual tension between our loyalty to our principles and our loyalty to our friends/family, and 3. Robert De Niro is an extremely handsome man. There are two showings and both seem likely to sell out, so move fast. [bampfa]
Also: Oakland Noticing Club: Mysteries at Local Economy (Rockridge) / The 2nd annual Fall Back Youth Slam at The Alan Blueford Center for Justice (Uptown) / Phil Cousineau: The Wisdom of the Odyssey at Counterculture Museum (West Bay)
Sunday, September 6
Cleveland Community Garden Work Day, 10am, Cleveland St & Capital St (Cleveland Heights). An empty lot can be a public good when it becomes the place we gather together to tend to the earth, each other, and plant roots together. Grab your trowel and your gloves and get to weeding. [a flyer]
[West Bay Bonus Event] San Francisco Zine Fest 2026, 11am, The Hibernia (Mid Market). ISBNs are overrated. One of the nation’s greatest zine fests and the largest in Northern California, the SF Zine Fest is a celebration of the indiest of the indie presses: punks stealing office supplies from the work copy room. Tables are no longer available to rent, but bring some zines from home anyway because many zinesters like trading instead of selling. This year’s guest of honor is V. Vale of RE/Search, and exhibitors include the East Bay Alternative Book & Zine Fest, creating a beautiful nested matryoshka doll of zine festivals. [SF Zine]
Walter Riley x Marcus Books // Civil Rights and Structural Attacks, 1pm, Marcus Books (Longfellow). Walter Riley is going to hang out with all the cool people in Oakland at the one and only Marcus Books, the oldest Black bookstore in the USA. Come learn from your elders, and specifically from Boots’s dad and his lifetime of advocacy for the oppressed as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer. [eventbrite]
Vital Signs Series: Removal of the Eye, 2pm, Shapeshifters Cinema (Jack London Square). Creepy baby won’t sleep, creepy mother in law is convinced it’s because there’s an evil eye curse on the family, and that is just as logical as any of the other reasons a baby won’t sleep. The filmmakers, their actual baby and actual parents star. It’s called a comedy but sounds like horror to me. [insta]
A Woman Is a Woman, 4:30pm, BAMPFA (Berkeley). A musical that doesn’t care all that much about the singing or the dancing or even the music for that matter. This was Godard’s first studio production, and it’s too playful not to be charming, despite its own sometimes contemptuous efforts at genre deconstruction. With Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo and some other guy. [bampfa]
The Oakland Slam & Wide Open Mic, 5pm, Nomadic Bookshop (Uptown). It’s Sunday night and that means we’re praying at the altar of poetry, writhing in the aisles of alliteration, and tithing to the bookstores holding it all together. [insta]
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). The only Scorsese movie to receive a successful sitcom adaptation, this 1974 followup to Mean Streets is, in my opinion, his best film. Ellen Burstyn’s phenomenal and Oscar-winning lead performance as a single mother cast adrift in the Southwest stands alongside a shocking number of red letter supporting roles, from Harvey Keitel’s return as The Most Unsettling Man In Hollywood to Jodie Foster as a delinquent tomboy on the mean streets of, uh, Tucson. [bampfa]
Also: Author Talk: Annalee Newitz on Automatic Noodle at San Lorenzo (Deep South Oakland)