Milking the Moon: a Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet Online

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Milking the Moon: a Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet Online lWQDB (Download) Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet Online [lWQDB.ebook] Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet Pdf Free From Untreed Reads Publishing audiobook | *ebooks | Download PDF | ePub | DOC Download Now Free Download Here Download eBook #2277600 in Books 2015-05-28Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.02 x 1.06 x 5.98l, 1.75 #File Name: 1611878179428 pages | File size: 34.Mb From Untreed Reads Publishing : Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet: 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Milking the MemoriesBy Lee WhitlockWalker is a Southern storyteller. He more than fits his own definition of one who speaks with dozens of side tales (parentheses). Webster calls these parenthetical expressions "a remark or passage that departs from the theme of a discourse." Walker may depart from the theme, but he always returns, and it always fits. He says: "The mark of a good storyteller is: Have a whole shelf full of shoeboxes of details.... It's like those ballad singers at the Scottish lords who improvised new verses for those ballads every night...." What music this Southern balladeer makes especially as he explains the use of the Southern front porch for storytelling, visiting, shelling peas, and an explanation of the etiquette of porch visiting. He even makes a detour (parentheses) to explain how front and back porches differ (shell peas on the front porch, shrimp on the back). One comes away understanding why Walker fit in so perfectly with the side walk café salons of Paris and Rome. The Southern porches were his training ground. Those were the original talking salons. One almost hears the music of porch furniture: "...a whole world of wicker or rattan chairs and divans and tables and plant stands and swings big enough for three people. How I wish some composer had heard, as I, the different sounds of porch swings. Everything from rattle-squeak to crunch-budge-tink. With a bass accompaniment of shuffling feet, often bare." Ah, these were the real salons, set to music, before people had to go to Paris to talk and before Americans discovered those faux porches that serve as little more than standing room on the front of today's dull houses. Walker explains the South as he remembers it, the South he carried with him around the world, and it makes any Southerner long for the South of his/her youth, or it beckons any curious Yankee to come and savor a romantic time and place that they've never experienced....0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. "LUVVED" this very funny, human spoken memoir of a young Southerner's adventures ...By Jan H. Munroe"LUVVED" this very funny, human spoken memoir of a young Southerner's adventures from his home town of Mobile, Alabama to New York City to Paris to Rome and then (30 years later) back home to Mobile. He collects stories, gossip and fun along the way and leaves nothing to the imagination. Great Fun!1 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Being thereBy Rex Hammock"As-told-to" scribe Katherine Clark preserves Eugene Walter's voice in the memoir of this "character," as we call folks like him down South. Imagine Truman Capote without the best-selling books and TV fame. This is how Walter comes across in this memoir-autobiography-oral history transcript. He is a Southern Zelig, always showing up in pivotal moments in the development of literature and arts during the mid-20th century. Recalling his days in late 1940s New York, 1950s Paris and 1950s-60s Rome, he drops more names than the New York City phone book. From Greta Garbo to Judy Garland to Frederico Fellini, he hangs out with them all. The best-written portions of the book deal with his native Mobile, however. But who is he? He's the ultimate fly-on-the-wall. He writes some, acts some, translates movie scripts, throws cheap yet creative parties and plays the part of Southern eccentric in Europe. Who is he? He seems like an early 1970s Dick Cavett Show guest: an obscure bon vivant who shows up with George Plimpton to discuss a new Martha Graham dance or to cook a Southern meal. I ran across a mention of the book in an Oxford American magazine article and got a copy after reading a couple of very positive reviews by critics like Jonathan Yardly of the Washington Post. The book also received a 2001 National Book Critics Circle award nomination for biography. It's not for everyone. And I'm probably in that group. But it is intriguing and engaging and, at time, humorous. And at all times, like its subject, unique. FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITIC CIRCLE AWARD This sumptuous oral biography of Eugene Walter, the best-known man you've never heard of, is an eyewitness history of the heart of the last century-enlivened with personal glimpses of luminaries from William Faulkner and Martha Graham to Judy Garland and Leontyne Price- and a pitch-perfect addition to the Southern literary tradition that has critics cheering. In his 76 years, Eugene Walter ate of "the ripened heart of life," to quote a letter from Isak Dinesen, one of his many illustrious friends. Walter savored the porch life of his native Mobile, Alabama, in the the l920s and '30s; stumbled into the Greenwich Village art scene in late-1940s New York; was a ubiquitous presence in Paris's expatriate café society in the 1950s (where he was part of the Paris Review at its inception); and later, in 1960s Rome, participated in the golden age of Italian cinema. He was somehow everywhere, bringing with him a unique and contagious spirit, putting his inimitable stamp on the cultural life of the twentieth century. "Katherine Clark...has edited Eugene Walter's oral history into a book as amazing as the man himself." JONATHAN YARDLEY, WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD "Milking the Moon has perfect pitch and flawlessly captures Eugene's pixilated wonderland of a life.... I love this book-and I couldn't put it down." PAT CONROY "Surprising and serendipitous." NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Anecdotes so frothy they ought to be served with a paper parasol over crushed ice." PEOPLE "A rare literary treat...the temptation is to wolf it down all at once, but it's much more satisfying to take your sweet time. The most unique oral history of the mid-twentieth century." TIMES-PICAYUNE (NEW ORLEANS) "An exceptionally fun read." ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION .com When Katherine Clark began interviewing Eugene Walter (1921-98) in 1991 for an oral biography of this Mobile, Alabama, legend's picaresque life, friends asked her, "Do you think he will tell you the truth?" "I certainly hope not!" she replied. Clark, herself a Southerner, understood that the charm of Walter's conversation came from his brilliantly polished stories, in which "at a certain point the actual gives way to the apocryphal." So readers shouldn't ask if Tallulah Bankhead really gave Walter three pubic hairs or if Anna Magnani actually asked the mayor of Rome to help find Walter's lost cat: that's not the point. These anecdotes express Walter's appreciation of people he likes, and although the narrative is stuffed with famous names from Truman Capote to Leontyne Price, the exuberant protagonist finds less celebrated folks just as fascinating. His loving evocation of Mobile in the 1920s, when the front porch was the center of all social life, is just as detailed as his portraits of sojourns in more glamorous enclaves: Greenwich Village after World War II ("where I could sit in the evenings and hear Jane and Paul Bowles quarreling in their nearby apartment"); Paris in the early 1950s (his short story "Troubador" appeared in the first issue of Paris ); and Rome during its La Dolce Vita years. Walter refused Fellini's plea that he perform with his marionettes in that particular movie, but he played an American journalist in 8 1/2 and "must have been in over a hundred of those crazy Italian films" before returning to Mobile in 1979. ("Sooner or later all Southerners come home, not to die, but to eat gumbo.") Clark, who captured an Alabama midwife's wisdom in Motherwit, gets out of her subject's way and lets his words create an enchanting world in this marvelously entertaining reminiscence. --Wendy SmithFrom Publishers Weekly"I'm just a Southern boy let loose in the big world," declares Walter in his delightful oral autobiography, the culmination of months of talks with literature professor Clark (Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story). Born in 1921 in Mobile, Ala., (which is, he notes, "a separate kingdom. We are not North America; we are North Haiti"), Walter spent most of his adulthood in New York, Paris and Rome, where he published a prize-winning novel (The Untidy Pilgrim, 1954), translated hundreds of screenplays, helped found the Paris , appeared in Fellini films and figured centrally in the social life of the literati, entertaining everyone from T.S. Eliot to Muriel Spark to Dylan Thomas at his lavish parties. Legendary both in his hometown and among the European jet set of the '50s and '60s, Walter displays an abiding fascination with people of all kinds. Astute and opinionated, he comments more on the personalities than the output of his literary associates.
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