Hermetic Hotties
What is Anne Carson doing on The L Word?
By Meghan O'Rourke


In the past five years, Anne Carson has somehow become a culture hero—the *anti-bourgeois* variety of icon that, as Susan Sontag once noted, appeals by being *repetitive, obsessive, and impolite.* That Carson is serving as a catalyst for an L Word moment of erotic connection—and as a signpost for the audience the show plainly expects to draw—is not, for those who have been following her career, entirely surprising. But what vision of love and relationships is an invocation of Anne Carson supposed to telegraph, exactly—and how did it come to be noteworthy enough for television?