I went on Thursday night to a new literary event, Babble On, which was not quite as advertised in the SF Weekly… no Bucky Sinister, no Shawna Virago… and Peter Orner was not the MC but a featured reader. Anyway, it was a swell show. The MC was Petrice Gaskin (pictured), dressed in a dandyish chapeau, shirt and tie, but also, confusingly, a wool jumper and stockings.

Unlike most such events, the open mike led off the evening instead of following the featured readers, and the logic of this became so clear that I decided all literary events should be run this way.

The audience and the performers were crammed into a small space in the back of the store, where there was room for about 14 chairs. Then there were people standing all through the store in the aisles between shelves and tables of books. Once again I was impressed by the willingness of young San Franciscans to stand for over an hour to hear not-famous people read their work.

Strangely, the open mike readers were all men, and most of them sucked except for poet Hugh Behm-Steinberg — who said he published as Hugh Steinberg. His stuff was beautiful and adult and sharp, it made the other amateurs look lame.

Then: Anne-E. Wood, who has a sort of crazed, hungry look, read from a collection of stories called “Two If by Sea.” The stories were all about listening hard to the people around you, but they were funny and somwhat fantastic. I liked the stories so much I bought her book on the way out.

Theresa Walsh read about a contest of sorts between Madison Avenue and I’m not sure what — fabulousness, I think. I wrote down the collective noun she used at one point: “an exultation of anarchists.”

Jeanne Foss (pictured at right) sang and played guitar. She sang these long, strange songs with about 25 verses each, very simple chord structures and almost no melody at all. In one of them the narrator dies after about verse 6 and I thought it was all over but then she just kept going, the way Debby Harry does in “Rapture” after the Man From Mars “shoots you dead, and he eats your head, and now you’re in the Man From Mars,” and you don’t stop, you keep on eating cars. And her songs were on the minimal side of tuneful, the way hip hop songs are, too, but then suddenly I thought she reminded me of Leonard Cohen. But her visual presentation was 1970s lesbian folksinger, complete with headband. So her act was full of contradictions, and the lyrics of the songs were actually fantastic, so her whole thing was cool.

Finally Peter Orner read from his novel “The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo.” Orner’s introduction was, like, the most impressive introduction I’ve ever heard at a reading on Valencia Street — fellowships, blurbs from the New York Times, the whole shebang. His novel is clearly an impressive work, though he read a bunch of short segments that were a little hard to put together, and he didn’t explain why he was in Namibia, the setting of the novel, in the first place.

All in all a terrific evening. You understand why people are willing to stand for an hour and a half in a not-very-warm bookstore listening to people who are not famous. The quality around here is just amazing.