Chaucer’s Books hosts David Perlis for a book talk and signing of “Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast,” 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19 at 3321 State St., Santa Barbara.
Book description: Just north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, lies Marin County, a landscape of redwood forests and misted hills that, between World War II and the 1980s, became the unlikely epicenter of a cultural awakening.
From blockbuster cinema to psychedelic rock, Eastern spirituality to speculative fiction, Marin helped forge a new American mythology.
In “Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast,” Perlis delivers the first comprehensive narrative history of this awakening, what he calls the “Marinaissance.”
The movement gave rise to “Star Wars,” nurtured the improvisational ethos of the Grateful Dead, and seeded a creative revolution that reverberated across music, religion, literature, film and philosophy.
Marin was not only home to cultural juggernauts such as George Lucas, Alan Watts, Janis Joplin, Robin Williams, Gary Snyder, and Philip K. Dick, it profoundly shaped their work.
As Perlis writes “The Marinaissance is multitudes,” manifesting everywhere from the Jedi’s belief in the power of the self to Shel Silverstein’s anti-authoritarian children’s verse.
Marin was a nexus of East-meets-West spirituality and a proving ground for sounds and stories that would dominate global culture.
Drawing from archival research and firsthand interviews, including voices like Anne Lamott and Peter Coyote, Perlis reconstructs an era of radical experimentation, Chaucer’s said.
“From mud-sunk Sausalito houseboats to back-to-the-land communes, ‘Morning in Marin’ traces how a loose network of freethinkers — united by Zen practice, psychedelic exploration, reverence for nature, self-sufficiency, and a belief in human potential — sparked an inner revolution that ultimately reshaped global entertainment and spiritual life,” Chaucer’s said.
But Perlis also charts the contradictions. He examines the unique conditions that allowed the Marinaissance to flourish, producing some of the most valuable intellectual property and devoted fan cultures in modern history, while identifying the social, economic and ideological forces that led to its fragmentation.
“The result is a sweeping, immersive cultural history: a rollicking constellation of Zen teachers, Beat poets, mystic feminists, psychedelic rockers, New Age visionaries, and New Hollywood power brokers whose iconoclasm broke — and then remade — the mold of American culture,” Chaucer’s said.
Perlis is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Marin County, California. For nearly a decade he co-hosted the late night talk show “Night People on WFMU.” He has worked for the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Natural History.
He lives in Corrales, New Mexico. “Morning in Marin” is his first book.