You can't swing a cat without hitting a Gertrude Stein happening in this city. The Summer of Stein sprouted two exhibits about the queer icon (and her family) at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the SFMOMA; and now an opera production at the Yerba Buena Novellus Theater of the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson collaboration, Four Saints in Three Acts, performed by the Ensemble Parallele team. more ›

). $12, 7 p.m., at the Jewish Community Center, 3200 California (x Presidio). more ›

It's almost exactly fifty years later, and it still smacks you upside your beret-wearing cool-cat bongo-beating head, man -- Allan Ginsberg debuted his classic poem "Howl" on Friday, October 7, 1955, at a jam-packed Six Gallery on Fillmore Street. His passionate reading brought tears to the eyes of the crowd, and is widely viewed as having kick-started the SF Beat Movement of the 1950s. On the actual day of (which coincidentally is also a Friday), Howl publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti's a href="http://www.citylights.com">bookstore and literary festival are sponsoring a Howl Redux, where they'll play film footage of Ginsberg himself reading Howl. Afterwards, contemporary San Francisco area writers will read the works of other revolutionary San Francisco area writers (so Daniel Handler is reading Gertrude Stein, Jerry Brown is reading Jack London, and Armistead Maupin is reading Mark Twain, among others. Pick up tickets here. more ›