Anthony Valerio
 
 
 
About award-winning author Anthony Valerio's Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer, Professor Ellen Nerenberg says:
 
"These confessions, mine, Walter Michael Gregory's, center on the interstices between soft and hard literary porn as they were known in the 1960s and 70s."
 This is the kernel of Anthony Valerio's salty and sweet, romping short book, Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer. Trying to survive as a writer in New York City, Wally joins Ern Billions, Bonita Guggenheim, and Tad Browning as a staff writer at Porn/Prose, where, on spec and on commission, they write porn for hire. And "for hire" is part of the title of the pseudonymous Wally's best-known effort, This Body for Hire, which also has a place within the pages of Valerio's Confessions. Things are hard and soft in so many ways and directions. Among the hard are the winter of 1979, the rules of copyediting that Wally learns at Ern's knee, the lead of the Number 2 pencils he uses to ply his trade as a writers and editor, the concept of one-way staircase that disappears behind anyone who climbs it, the black laces of Sister Morisella's hard-soled black shoes. Among the soft we can group the heart of Anonymous, the hooker Wally invents as the first-person narrator of This Body for Hire, the pillowy arms and bosoms of the women his single mom Caroline surrounds herself with, the rounded characters of the notes Caroline the wordless uses to express herself. Pastiche reigns supreme as genre in this book that pivots between hard and soft, between first and third person narrator, between the writing hand and sober, dignified copyeditor's font and type. Delightful and witty, Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer is unafraid to own its Times Square-in-the-1970s setting.
Prof. E. Nerenberg, Wesleyan University

You could hear the pride in Daisy’s voice and see the delight in her eyes when her Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese fellow players are reluctant to speak their native language in my company, and she says: “O go right ahead. He understands perfectly.” I understand some. Misunderstanding much has perhaps affected my dreams. With Daisy on tour here in Italy I am in the land of Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano, Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti, Margarita Buy—and under these skies of whom do I dream? Elizabeth Taylor. Not the child Elizabeth Taylor of Jane Eyre or National Velvet or the youthful Elizabeth Taylor of Raintree County or Butterfield 8 or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—but an older more voluptuous Elizabeth Taylor, and in my dream we were in some bed and we were naked. “Cosmic breasts,” according to Richard Burton—yes, they were there, soft and voluminous, and heavy thighs and thick arms and her eyes black as coal, shiny, happy eyes. Moreover, we were having a lot of fun; much laughter and merriment. In what period of her life could she have been so happy? First days of her marriages? In the company of her great friends Rock Hudson and Michael Jackson, before their illnesses and changes? She raised a great deal of money in behalf of AIDS research. I could be sitting on a Spanish step beside the room in which young Johnny Keats died, watching young lovers go by hand-in-hand, or pass the Love Canal on Via Piella in Bologna, the Reno river coursing through the land-locked city, a window with all sorts of love notes inscribed on it looking down upon the river piercing houses upon it, or when a young person about to embark on a love affair confides in me--I say: “Get an AIDS test. And insist on seeing the results of one from your lover. This is what Elizabeth Taylor said.”