Seneca Review Essay by Noah Eli Gordon

admitted as much when the song was first released in 1989, a year I was dead set on developing what I then thought of as taste — the ability to carry a dual-consciousness, projecting one set of values publicly, while cradling an often incommensurate, personal, and private stance on the very same things. In other words, if it’s popular, it’s obviously bad, so don’t let on that you’re among the unenlightened lumpenproletariat, no matter how much joy you get from singing along to Skid Row in your mother’s basement. Disciple. Despicable. Bach glanced at the cover of the CD in his hand for just a second, just long enough to read the text there, but he got it wrong, and with Florentine’s correction I felt something else, even if Bach didn’t — shame. Bach’s mistake is the same one I’ve made again and again. In the classroom. At meetings. Among friends. The mistake that’s led me to shy away from reading publicly anything I haven’t already gone over in private. At the bar, it didn’t matter what words were scrolling across the monitors. I’d already committed the song to memory. It’s all past tense. ø I’ve never actually seen this before, but yes it’s a thrombosed vein, the doctor tells me, a specialist with a schedule so booked that I was given only five minutes of his time for what to me was an absolute emergency. He tells me to take hot baths, that it will clear up on its own, not such a big deal, you’ll be fine, trust me. A few nights ago, Marcus thought it’d be funny to pull the chair out from under me before I sat down. Nearly two months later, having mastered the art of orgasming from stimulation to the single dime-sized bit of flesh on the underside my penis that wouldn’t immediately, and painfully, reject any sort of physical contact, I learn that the doctor was indeed correct; it did go away. But so too did my sense that a pure Cartesian split of mind and body is a viable mode within which one might operate. ø Watch this, my wife says, her head turned sideways, toward me, away from the board ten feet in front of us on the barroom wall, before letting fly the dart that now pins itself squarely to the smallest circle in the exact red center of the board. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. The drawing I’d done at ten years old of what my brother insisted was somehow, miraculously, not the cave I 46