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

Today, December 8, Italians celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. All Catholics from recently baptized infants to men who, as a rule, do not go to church, which, in our entrada, comprised the majority of our men, the belief being that god would be more receptive to the prayers of our women more so  Read More 

On the drive into Abbadia San Salvatore we pass a stadium of boccie courts. It is closed and gated in preparation for The Feast of the Chestnut which is tomorrow. Italians give the chestnut its own feast day because the chestnut is shaped like a heart. Through the gate and beyond you could see  Read More 

(siena is divided into contrade, or, roughly, neighborhoods. Bensonhurst is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York)

In our Bensonhurst contrada it is always fall. Our trees are always shedding their leaves. Our young ones kick up these leaves walking through. They are orange-yellow and yellow. Our contrada is a bright one. Our women are  Read More