By Scott Garner

A baffled liquor store owner had left his cash register to investigate.  He was standing on the sidewalk outside his store, hands on his hips, watching dozens of people march in a kind of organized chaos up and down Valencia Street in San Francisco.

As I walked by him, he asked, “where are you people coming from?”

I answered: “Lit Crawl.” 

Lit Crawl caps off San Francisco’s well-known November festival, Litquake, one of the largest literary events on the West Coast.  This year’s festival was eight days long.  Lit Crawl, the festival’s final event, offered an evening of readings by more than 200 authors, combined with drinking and merrymaking, all taking place over a three-hour period.  Concentrated around a one-mile radius on Mission and Valencia streets, the readings were held in independent bookstores, art galleries, and neighborhood bars.
      
When I was stopped by the liquor store owner, I had been making my way to Foreign Cinema, a combined French bistro and movie house that was hosting one of the night’s last set of readings — “The Tasting Course: Authors Write about Food and Wine.”

Before resuming my trip to Foreign Cinema, I peeked into an event at the Elbo Room showcasing small presses and local literary magazines.  I pushed my way past people absorbed in words and in their drinks, in time to hear Scott Upper, a writer for a journal called Instant City.  Upper was reading selections from a piece about his career change from a Bay Area dot-comer to a traveling sex worker. The selections were hilarious and gritty.  But it was still early in the evening and I was still sober; I was not quite ready for Upper’s oeuvre.    

Luckily, only a few blocks away, I discovered international poets and authors offering selections of a different flavor and sensibility. German rapper and slam poet Bas Boettcher performed in his native tongue. His translated piece, “All Things Considered,” started with a wry, comical look at one of our universal pastimes:  “At the cinema you can look at larger than life, which you can otherwise only look at small, or not at all. At the cinema you can experience things without moving an inch . . . .”  Simultaneously, just across the street, Oakland-based travel and fiction writer Linda Watanabe McFerrin took her audience on a visceral, frightening taxi ride set in Kuala Lumpur.
 
Upon arriving at Foreign Cinema, I discovered that the place was packed.  I was only able to squeeze halfway into the door.  I strained to hear Laura Fraser, author of a best-selling travel memoir, An Italian Affair.  Fraser read from her sassy and matter-of-fact essay about her former days as a vegetarian:

        My animal rights philosophy had a lot of holes from the start. First of all,
        I excluded fish from the animal kingdom—not only because fish taste delicious
        grilled with a little butter and garlic, but also because they make it a lot
        easier to be a vegetarian when you go out to restaurants . . . .  All my deep
        vegetarian questioning was silenced one day when a friend ordered roasted
        rosemary chicken for two. I thought I’d try “just a bite,” and then I was ripping
        into it like a starving hyena. Roasted chicken,I realized,is wonderful.

Fraser was followed by pastry chef and food writer Shuna Fish Lydon (yes, “Shuna Fish” Lydon), who was poetic in her musings about how recipes are passed on from one culinary hand to the next.  Her reading has both heart and intelligence.  She said:

        Recipes are guides. They are as loose as linen on a hot day or as constricting
        as a straight jacket at Belleview. Recipes have a life of their own when released
        into the hands of all and sundry. They flit and skip and hide and ambush. Recipes
        cannot be secured forever. Even in the most light and airtight rooms, recipes have
        a way of turning into ether and quietly air-tip-toeing through the keyhole.”

Litquake began in 2002.  It has been bringing together a diverse mix of writers, performance artists, journalists and thinkers ever since.  As usual, the events this year were as eclectic as the city’s ideas and populace.  Panel discussions ranged from the practical, such as joining or fixing a book club, to the esoteric, such as the origin of the universe and the existence of the soul. 

Like many of San Francisco’s traditions, Litquake grew out of a grassroots idea that  gained an unstoppable momentum over the years. In 1999, journalist and authors Jane Ganahl and Jack Boulware organized “Litstock,” an afternoon of readings by Bay Area authors at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The response was so positive that they agreed to produce it again the following year. In 2002, the event was relaunched as Litquake.  From the organizers themselves: “Litquake’s mission has expanded to foster interest in literature, to perpetuate a sense of community by making the solitary social, and to publicize San Francisco’s literary heritage, present and future.”

Litquake has become a San Francisco institution.  Let another San Francisco institution, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, send all of us off until next October, with a piece he performed in 2002 for Litquake:

        So we’re having a quake
        We’re going to have a literary quaking
        It’s announced in the smallest papers
        free for the taking . . .