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

November 16, 2013

John Dante & Hugh Hefner meet for the first time in nightclub Dante's Inferno,
Chicago, 1959

Around 8 o’clock, Renée called up:
“Hugh Hefner just came in.”
He was still upstairs in his office. “You have got to be kidding.”
“No. He’s here with another guy.”
So he went down and saw and heard the buzz of Dante’s Inferno’s first customers’ eyes and mouths wide open, looking and pointing at Gustav Doré’s scenes of Hell. Though Playboy magazine was already a big success, Hugh Hefner’s visage was not as yet well known.
John Dante writes:
“Two guys stood together, one wearing an elegant black mohair suit and the other in penny loafers and white socks and a kind of Brooks Brothers jacket and maybe a cardigan sweater.”
The tallish guy in the mohair suit looked the part of a playboy so he extended his hand to the one whom he believed was Hugh Hefner. Then he said it for the first time:
“Hi, I’m John Dante.”
He had signed the invitations Johnny Dante to go along with the place.
“It made sense promotionally because if I had signed them ‘John Aimola,’ people would have said, ‘Who the fuck is John Aimola?’ I’m reinventing myself. I was thinking of Humphrey Bogart who is Ricky Blaine in the film Casablanca. I was picturing myself this kind of entrepreneur.”
He had extended his hand to the wrong man, Victor Lownes, who shook it nonetheless and said:
“No, this is Hugh Hefner.”
John Dante turned and looked into Hugh Hefner’s face for the first time. He was “thin, almost emaciated, and I saw an integrity, a forthrightness, an honesty. He looked straight at you when he spoke.”
He extended his hand to the right guy and said again, confirming his transformation from an ordinary Italian to one with a famous name.
“Hi, I’m John Dante.”