Diary of a Detour - Lesley Stern

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Résumé :
Diary of a Detour is film scholar and author Lesley Stern's memoir of living with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She chronicles the fears and daily experience of coming to grips with an incurable form of cancer by describing the dramas and delving into the science. Stern also nudges cancer off center stage by turning to alternative obsessions and pleasures. In seductive writing she describes her life in the garden and kitchen, the hospital and the library, and her travels-down the street to her meditation center, across the border to Mexico, and across the world to Australia. Her immediate world is inhabited with books, movies, politics, and medical reports that provoke essayistic reflections. As her environment is shared with friends, chickens, a cat called Elvis, mountain goats, whales, lions, and microbes the book opens onto a larger than human world. Intimate and meditative, engrossing and singular, Diary of a Detour offers new ideas about what it might mean to live and think with cancer, and with chronic illness more broadly....

Biographie:
Lesley Stern is Professor Emerita of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego...

Sommaire:
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...