Diary of a Detour

Lesley Stern

Book

Diary of a Detour

Lesley Stern

Language: English

Published/Copyright: 2020

Published by

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This book is in the series

Writing Matters!

About this book

Diary of a Detour is film scholar and author Lesley Stern's memoir of living with cancer, where she chronicles the fears and daily experience of coming to grips with an incurable disease and turns to alternative obsessions and pleasures, from travel and friendships to her four chickens.

Author / Editor information

Lesley Stern is Professor Emerita of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego; author of Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing, The Smoking Book, and The Scorsese Connection; and coeditor of Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance.

Reviews

“Diary of a Detour is such a great book, excessive like Lesley Stern's own intense appetite for life that includes her wide knowledge about the intricacies of disease. It's the most pleasurable cancer book imaginable. I was riveted, the specificity of the writing is a drug. Stern has written a wonderful, stirring, magnificent book. Oh, World, you are the love object of this hardworking, self-deprecating extravagant genius.”

-- Eileen Myles, author of Evolution

“Diary of a Detour is wonderful on so many levels. Besides being an extraordinary writer, Lesley Stern is emotionally and intellectually sophisticated in such subtle and deep ways. She outlines the stakes of learning to live and feel in the grip of inescapable finitude and mortality, together with others of many kinds and species, but also alone, as irreducibly this vulnerable person and no other. I love this book.”

-- Donna J. Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

"What emerges most powerfully is Stern’s determination to live—not just to stay alive but, as Tennyson writes in 'Ulysses,' 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' . . . A mixture of the mundane and the medical, the ordinary and the extraordinary."

-- Kirkus Reviews

"[Stern's] final book, the magnificent Diary of a Detour (2020) that appeared just before her passing, records how the force of obsession – obsessions with planting and tending, with chickens, with the growing and preparing of food, with the cycles of nature – literally prolonged her life, pulling her through into new and brilliant investigations, and an ever-widening collaboration with activists at all levels of the environmental movement."

-- Adrian Martin ArtsHub

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General Interest

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vi
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1 Chickens Saved My Life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	1
2 The Time It Takes (By Way of an Introduction) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	3
3 Secret Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	7
4 A Possum Fate (Averted) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	9
5 Events Unfold in the Snow Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	12
6 Chicken Feet Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	17
7 Why Chickens, or Homage to Gloria Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	18
8 Boomerang Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	22
9 A Way of Making Another Egg Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	25
10 Shivers and Shakes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	28
11 The Chicken or the Egg Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	32
12 Strawberry/Fetish Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	34
13 Life after Life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	40
14 The Poetry of Pigs Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	44
15 Some Musings on Metaphor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	45
16 Tricking the Body Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	51
17 Chicken Joke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	53
18 Nice Paint Job Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	57
19 Frenzied Calm Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	59
20 Tokhm-e Morgh Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	73
21 Disability Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	74
22 Why Me, Lord? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	75
23 Five Down, Two to Go Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	80
24 The Warrior Song of King Gesar Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	81
25 Euphoria Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	85
26 A Fern Romance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	87
27 Weeding Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	89
28 Untimely Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	92
29 Blue/Shimmer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	93
30 Missed Connection Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	109
31 Blown through the Air Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	111
32 Don’t Think about It (For the Moment) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	114
33 Spheres of Glass Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	115
34 Purple Haze Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	123
35 Cantankerous Rooster Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	125
36 Dead and Alive: A Tenuous Continuum Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	128
37 Breakfast Anecdotes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	138
38 Landscape Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	139
39 Tootin Pootin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	143
40 Dragon Inn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	150
41 All along the Highway Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	153
42 A Lion’s Roar Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	156
43 The Ecology of Cancer, and What Do Ants Have to Do with It? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	158
44 What Does It Matter? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	164
45 So Unctuous and So Tender Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	166
46 Dorland Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	169
47 Touched by a Whale Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	174
48 Travel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	181
49 The Answer Is Not Coming Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	182
50 Nightclub Bouncers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	184
51 All Natural Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	187
52 Anza Borrego Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	190
53 Lighten Up Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	197
54 Glad to Be Here (Plaintive Knowledge) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	203
55 Stinging Nettles Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	205
56 A Talent for Cancer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	212
57 Phobia: The Chickens Come Home to Roost Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	214
58 Walking Meditation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	219
59 A Ticket for Tuppence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	221
60 Reaching Yirrkala Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	226
61 Chookless Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	245
62 Chicken Shit Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	246
63 Mimetic Pain Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	250
64 You Are Mostly Not You Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	254
65 RIP Elvis, the King of the Cats Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	260
66 Afterlife Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	263
67 Art Alive Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	268
68 Bodies in Pieces Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	271
69 A Prospect of Consolation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	275
70 Fig Future Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	278
71 Between Fresh and Rotten Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	280
72 Blood Poetry Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	294
73 Shimmer and Glimmer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	295
74 I Need an Advocate Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	297
75 Nameless Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	302
76 Fermentation Dreams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	306
77 The Structure That a Life Has Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	309
78 Like a Cat in a Hat, Sleek and Brave: RIP Ryoko Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	311
79 The Malvolio Gene Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	314
80 What Do You Expect? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	318
81 Chimera Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	320
82 The Last Chicken Standing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	335
83 Arrivederci Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	338
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	343

Publishing information

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

eBook published on:

August 10, 2020

eBook ISBN:

9781478012290

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

Main content:

320

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478012290

eBook ISBN: 9781478012290

Audience(s) for this book

General/trade;

Diary of a Detour

Overview

About this book

Author / Editor information

Reviews

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Table of contents

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