Jerry Williams teaches at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. He has published two collections of poems, Casino of the Sun (2003) and Admission (2010), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

The Feral Issue

ns 73-74 | Fall 2009/Spring 2010

The "Feral Issue" presents work by a range of people, from those who have been doing animal studies all along to those newly exploring the field. If it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world. We hope that the writing here will give our readers a sense of what animal studies is and where it's going, and also add some new voices to its course.

Read this Issue

Published Spring/Summer 2008

The Tonight Show

by Jerry Williams | ns 70

After every single game
and most practices
we sat in the family room
with the television off.
My father apostrophized
while I stared at a row
of wooden geese with artificial
gold-plated wings flying
across the manila wall,
suffering through a ruthless,
two-hour critique of my shooting,
my defense, my passing and rebounding—
even my timeout huddle posture.
You didn't need to be Greek
to recognize the unwholesomeness
of this father-son fiasco.
Hence, the geese and the staring
and the migraines that arrived,
like wages, twice a month.
Sick headaches, my mother
called them in the original Hillbilly.
The pain started in my eyes,
luminosity burned, and the borders
of objects and faces wavered.
Inside of an hour, I lay flat
on my back with the lights out,
quietly moaning to myself,
as sulfuric acid sloshed around
the mutiny of my cortex.
My mother would bring me
a warm dishrag for my forehead
and a worthless pill to dissolve
under my tongue. The hours passed
in gong-like fashion and just before
Ed McMahon introduced Johnny Carson
I would vomit in the trashcan
my mother left by the side of the bed,
and the pain simply
resolved itself and floated away.
I will never forget the sweet relief
of walking down the gangplank
to where my parents sat
waiting for The Tonight Show
and drinking sulfuric acid
by the glassful. They let me sit in front
of the television and watch Carson
whose squinting, paternal laughter
signaled the end of an ordeal.
Life seemed to begin anew
right there in the family room
with Burbank gleaming like Ithaca
in a completely different time zone.

MR BOOKS

Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.

Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.

Purchase Critics at Work.