.ll.

October in San Francisco not only brings sunny weather (with a few days of rain which used to be called “exceptional;” now they're attributed to global warming), but also its unique literary festival Litquake, spreading over two weeks with readings and parties until it ends with Litcrawl, a relatively fast-paced, 3-period series of readings in 3 sets of nearly 30 venues along Valencia Street in the Mission district. Needless to say, one needs to plan ahead, because those places fill up well before you have time to walk from the previous event. But it's great fun, and also refreshing to see so many, mostly young people excited about books and their mostly young authors.

One could say that Litcrawl is the playful ending to a varied but legitimate literary festival, in which a few star authors launch their latest books, professors discuss the merits of the previous century's literature (the current century being still too young to study), and journalists give you a tour of the Beats' North Beach. Like an earthquake, Litquake is felt through the entire city and what we call the Bay Area, taking advantage of venues one would not normally go to.

This year, I discovered Z-Space, a dance performance space ideally suited for three panels (mystery writers; short story writers; novelists) on a Saturday afternoon; the California Book Club, a genuine club for book lovers, complete with armchairs and a bar; a not-so-antique antique store filled with conversation pieces; and graffiti by the elusive Banksy at Broadway and Columbus. At the end of Litcrawl some years ago, I chanced upon Writers with Drinks, a very entertaining monthly series held at the back of a pub on 22nd Street, where authors read amid the shooting stars of a disco ball. I’d recommend attending it if you visit, to feel how this city’s heart beats for the written word.

I usually read fiction, but I am aware of the need to enlarge one's library with subjects that challenge the status quo inside our minds. I will not seek new books in subjects that I was none too happy to leave behind, after High School or College, and yet they find a way to me, in one form or another, to pique my curiosity and at the same time challenge a few tired neurons to start firing and growing again. But I find myself looking for styles and plots that I like, raising the bar even higher every time, finding myself disappointed when, in the middle of a novel, I find inaccuracies in scenes, or inconsistencies in characters. Then it's time to look for something new. Which is how I stumbled on a talk by Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow, co-authors of War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality (Random House).

I myself tend to agree with the likes of Richard Dawkins, who made a few enemies by becoming the world leader of staunch atheists against extremist religious views, but Mlodinow, who collaborated with Stephen Hawkins and wrote for Star Trek, has a more gentle approach and sometimes agrees with Chopra on what makes us human. I remain fascinated by the unexplained, which is the passion of both the scientist and the spiritualist. Back when I programmed computers, I found poetry in code and magic in the unexplained side-effects of software. It's good to know that people like Leonard Mlodinow keep researching very complex topics for us instead of selling algorithms to speed up trading on Wall Street. These days I hear a lot about a worldwide “shift in consciousness” coinciding with the changes in the earth's ecology, and it may just be that philosophy is going to catch up with science. It's good to keep all areas of the brain active and cooperating, and by extension, to raise the dialogue and cooperation between humans. After all, compared to the apparent age of the universe, humans haven’t existed and will not exist a very long time.

From the global to the more specific, I also attended a presentation of Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy (Oxford UP), by Susan N. Herman, who is President of the American Civil Liberties Union. It was held at the very serious Commonwealth Club of California (www.commonwealthclub.org), where one can hear about a very wide number of subjects. (While Ms. Herman read, people in another room learned about a World War One battle.) Ten years after the infamous Patriot Act was passed without discussion in Washington, the predictable mishaps have happened, and regardless of their good intentions, current and future governments find they can't let go of their increased powers. “People used to call these situations Orwellian,” she said, “but now it's Kafkaesque.” Perhaps we'll be saved by that global shift in consciousness.

So now I find myself needing to return to fiction. After reading Everything Beautiful Began After (HarperCollins), a very well-written novel by Simon Van Booy (I particularly liked shifting into a second person stream of consciousness at the end), I'll try You Deserve Nothing (Europa), by Alexander Maksik, new fiction I found down the street at Pegasus Books. 

I still resist submitting to an Internet vendor whose robot would tell me what to buy next. Will tell you why in an upcoming letter.

© Guy Tiphane 2011

Guy Tiphane writes short stories and poetry at guy@tiphane.org. He lives in Berkeley, California.