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