I hope I've got the line right. It was one that jumped out at me at the Anne Carson reading/performance tonight. Anne Carson is a genius. She is a Greek scholar and has a depth and breadth of knowledge that I find stunning. I loved loved loved her book "The Autobiography of Red." I didn't understand all of it, but I just swayed along anyway. She's funny, playful, eager, and uncompromising. She wants to uproot your brain.

Normally, I'm not so good at having my brain uprooted. It's taken me a long time to get an appreciation for non linear art like Pollack (whom I now like a lot) and John Cage (whom I do not.) Her first two pieces tonight had enough narrative coherency--like whole sections about one topic--that I had no trouble following them, though a Greek chorus called Gertrude Stein did interweave between some sections with fragments and phrases.

The first piece was about her Uncle Harry the hermit and the second was about her dad. Or, the first piece was about what makes a person happy and how much right do they have toward self-determination, and the second piece was about what makes a person happy and how we control our falls physically, emotionally, and spiritually. She referenced a dance teacher who teachers her performers how to fall from 32 feet. I didn't catch the artist's name, and it's equally possible she made it up. She does that.

The last piece was a set of facts, associations (Proust popped up several times), and made up vignettes about the Cycladian people (not made up) that was then randomized. Her husband called out random numbers at random intervals and she read those lines. There were moments of great tension waiting for the next line and moments where he called out numbers while she was still reading. A violin and otherworldly vocalist occasionally joined in.

I'm not going to say I understood the piece, but I didn't hate it. I liked the random facts like stars in the sky and me frantically trying to find the frying pan.