So Cal: Dispatches from the End of the World

This is a beautifully written collection of essays that pays homage to Joe’s “So Cal.” I love a good essay collection that takes a topic and looks at it from multiple angles.Joe is not a California native and talks about moving around quite a bit growing up. But it looks as though he found his place in Southern California. His California is a place of eccentric creative types, surfers, skateboarders, magnates, and environmentalists. It’s a place for contemplative road trips, beaches, and desert explorations. It sounds as though it's the hodgepodge nature of the place that calls to Joe. The essays capture all the disparate pieces of the place that make it unique.I must give a shout out for the cover-art. It’s gorgeous.

Joe Donnelly came from elsewhere, it seems, and yet he and Southern California have become inextricable, woven together like the ivy forest that became one with the roof of my garage over a couple of decades, such that neither could properly exist without the other. In this collection of essays and profiles, Donnelly takes his readers places, literal and figurative, as he follows the paths of wolves and tortoises; skaters, surfers and shabby intellectuals; and the kooks and characters and oddities that make SoCal SoCal. It's a masculine journey, yes, full of road trips—the highways beckon—evoking this region's past, present and future and offering glimpses into the quirky mind of our narrator, an unusual, pensive observer striving to make sense of his natural habitat and the soul of a place.

No one has really written about the eroticism of SoCal and surf culture in general the way Joe does. He understands the need to grasp the cultural ground zero that was the source of the surf culture explosion. SoCal culture in its formative period, was dominated by the aerospace industry, which created weapons and missiles, as well as the glass and foam for the cool plastic fetish objects called surfboards. The surfboards provided the ride for the erotic wet dreams of a global youth culture that was frantically trying to free itself from the emotionally dead cold war of the 50’s and early 60's. Joe's book is a tonic for the soul, and uses metaphors beautifully to zero in on the fine points - an amazing dispatch from the trenches.

I went into this collection with relatively high expectations - collection of stories, some featured in SJ which has some good writing, socal topics, short stories. However, aside of couple stories most didn’t click with me. I don’t know why, interviews were cool but lacked depth. Writing style is laborious and to marine gun journalistic style to read…one moment we are talking endangered wolves or something, next moment our author is banging the waitress. So LA. Actually even more LA than someone from LA could do (or write) and that is because author is from south Jersey. You have to move to CA as an adult to have this level of measured belonging. And to know and understand your exits and roads. Which all could have been awesome as perspective of writer didn’t try so hard to have the his socal desert perspective be so pronounced. Following the story on route 50 was tough. Stream of consciousness rat-at-at, where I struggled to make sense who the author is and whether I should be doing something better with my time. Teach me something, make me relate and hold me for the journey. It The New Yorker this ain’t. Five stars, cmon.That said, there are some good ones and authors work for the SJ had good subjects and stories written in more conducive manner. It’s a fun book and I’m glad I got it.

If Southern California always seems to escape you, Donnelly places it in your grasp.