Sunday, August 12, 2007


Academy of Linguistic Awareness

This Santa Barbara billboard, googled when lord knows what I was looking for given my recent forays (I hope spyware's McAffeed) into the realms of the cybersenses, sums up much about teaching, talking, listening, and enduring a polyglot mongrel of a balkanized dusty city less genteel than that resort town a hundred miles up the coast with enviable weather only my genial dentist can afford (at his weekend manse, a few doors down from which on The Mesa facing Shoreline Park last summer this time our family for a blissful week could pretend to live in the realm of a million-and-a-half dollar tiny 50s houses built on oil lands and considered once a downmarket neighorhood compared to, say Hope Ranch nearby not to mention Montecito the other side of town past what used to be the barrio).

The only Irish connection I can conjure after the past three bleary days immersed in dicey research involving Joyce and let's say for family viewing "transgressive" spaces of erotic contention is that Gerty McDowell even sounded a bit more high class than her hapless parodied counterpart a century later, sunbathing on another strand, tilting back to watch another fireworks display like the one we missed as we headed back to LA the Fourth of July, Gertie's likably peabrained, good-hearted, clueless, surely long-legged but perhaps less gimpy lass thinking of "it"--- no less than Toni Bentley (see here two days earlier posted, or the review on Hennig's "Rear View two days later-- indulging my "research" of late, blame it on Joyce) or you and me.

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