Diary of a Detour

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.

• Acknowledgments  ix1. Chickens Saved My Life  12. The Time It Takes (By Way of an Introduction)  33. Secret  74. A Possum Fate (Averted)  95. Events Unfold in the Snow  126. Chicken Feet  177. Why Chickens or Homage to Gloria  188. Boomerang  229. A Way of Making Another Egg  2510. Shivers and Shakes  2811. The Chicken or the Egg  3212. Strawberry/Fetish  3413. Life after Life  4014. The Poetry of Pigs  4415. Some Musings on Metaphor  4516. Tricking the Body  5117. Chicken Joke  5318. Nice Paint Job  5719. Frenzied Calm  5920. Tokhm-e Morgh  7321. Disability  7422. Why Me, Lord?  7523. Five Down, Two to Go  8024. The Warrior Song of King Gesar  8125. Euphoria  8526. A Fern Romance  8727. Weeding  8928. Untimely  9229. Blue/Shimmer  9330. Missed Connection  10931. Blown through the Air  11132. Don't Think about It (For the Moment)  11433. Spheres of Glass  11534. Purple Haze  12335. Cantankerous Rooster  12536. Dead and Alive: A Tenuous Continuum  12837. Breakfast Anecdotes  13838. Landscape  13939. Tootin Pootin  14340. Dragon Inn  15041. All along the Highway  15342. A Lion's Roar  15643. The Ecology of Cancer, and What Do Ants Have to Do with It?  15844. What Does It Matter?  16445. So Unctuous and So Tender  16646. Dorland  16947. Touched by a Whale  17448. Travel  18149. The Answer Is Not Coming  18250. Night Club Bouncers  18451. All Natural  18752. Anza Borrego  19053. Lighten Up  19754. Glad to Be Here (Plaintive Knowledge)  20355. Stinging Nettles  20556. A Talent for Cancer  21257. Phobia: The Chickens Come Home to Roost  21458. Walking Meditation  21959. A Ticket for Tuppence  22160. Reaching Yirrkala  22661. Chookless  24562. Chicken Shit  24663. Mimetic Pain  25064. You Are Mostly Not You  25465. R.I.P. Elvis, the King of the Cats  26066. Afterlife  26367. Art Alive  26868. Bodies in Pieces  27169. A Prospect of Consolation  27570. Fig Future  27871. Between Fresh and Rotten  28072. Blood Poetry  29473. Shimmer and Glimmer  29574. I Need an Advocate  29775. Nameless  30276. Fermentation Dreams  30677. The Structure That a Life Has  30978. Like a Cat in a Hat, Sleek and Brave: R.I.P. Ryoko  31179. The Malvolio Gene  31480. What Do You Expect?  31881. Chimera  32082. The Last Chicken Standing  33583. Arrivderci  338Notes  343

“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)