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

a Wednesday, off to see early Michelangelos with my own eyes. A marble angel--height 51.5, and a statue of Saint Proculus of Bologna which purportedly presages the David--are located in the Basilica of San Domenico. An Asian couple and I arrive at the door at the same time only to discover that the Basilica is closed and will reopen later in the afternoon. Michelangelo's work is open to view at fixed times. Walk over the courtyard's hard stones centuries old. Did Michelangelo walk over them? Did he wear socks? Seated on a shady bench, gaze up the brickwork column to the bronze statue of St. Dominic holding lilies in one hand, giving a blessing with the other that one day I will return to view the Michelangelos. Sunlight shines on the buildings along Via Garibaldi across the way. The old red devil Garibaldi halts his troops on a hill
outside Bologna.