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

Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer is out! Get your copy at GrAILING PRESS. COM or AMAZON.COM

Excerpt from SEMMELWEIS, the Women's Doctor by Anthony Valerio

Part III: BREAKTHROUGH

"Destiny chose me to be a missionary of truth as to the means that must be taken to avoid and to combat the puerperal scourge."—Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis

Semmelweis saw all that is worth in women, and newborns.—A.V.

     He did not go to Dublin and investigate and learn from its great maternity hospital, because after serving the last four months of 1846, his replacement, Dr. Breit, was named professor of obstetrics at the University of Tübingen. Semmelweis picked up at the imperial hospital where he had left off those four months earlier. Certainly, Klein did not welcome him back, but his teachers and mentors Drs. Skoda and Rokitansky had gained influence with the education minister and at court. After all, in addition to first-rate obstetricians to insure their divine rights, the royal family and courtesans needed top-notch internists and surgeons. The great physicians and teachers campaigned for Semmelweis's return as Assistant of Obstetrics, and that is what happened.

The Exchange

     Life is about people so Semmelweis shifted emphasis from the two lying-in clinics' similarities and differences to the human aspect. To the personnel of the two clinics: students and attending physicians who examined and delivered in the First clinic, midwives in the Second.

 "Deaths in the First Clinic were not caused by epidemic influences but by endemic and yet unknown factors," Semmelweis wrote about this exact time.

      A statistic from 1842 to the present spring day in 1847 that captured his attention was that maternity hospitals that were not teaching hospitals, as was his, or that trained only midwives, which his was not, had a lower mortality rate. This fact was as true in Strasbourg as it was in Vienna. Also, a colleague shared an observation to which Semmelweis listened: "The fewer deaths in Bartsch's (the Second) pavilion is due to the clumsiness of the medical students examining and delivering in the First. This must be the real cause of the fatal inflammation."

     Medical students and visiting physicians examined the women in the First Clinic, from the time they arrived, throughout labor and delivery.

     An experiment strikes him! Exchange the midwives of the Second Clinic with the students of the First! He received permission to make the switch, most likely through Joseph Skoda's influence. Now midwives examined and delivered in the First Clinic while medical students did same in the Second. Again Semmelweis waits…two weeks…a month… Finally, results! From June through December (1847), of the 1,841 deliveries in the First Clinic, 56 new mothers died. The mortality rate of 3% is comparable to the death rate of the Second Clinic!

     Death followed the students!

     He considers a few variables. The practices of midwives have no contact with cadavers. They do not bloody their hands. They do not go from Dissection to Delivery. They practice on the Phantom instead of on a cadaver. Another variable concerns the women who deliver on the street. They and their babies manage to escape death by the Fever.

      "To me," he wrote, "it appeared logical that patients who experienced street births would become ill at least as frequently as those who delivered in the clinic....What protected those who delivered outside the clinic from these destructive unknown endemic influences?"         

      He'd found the answer. Medical students did not attend to the pregnant women on the street. 

      "The fact is," he wrote to Lajos, "I am searching in our own clinic and we need to look nowhere else."

       He scrutinizes these medical students, foreign and native, their comings and goings, their habits. Waits outside Autopsy, watches silently, anonymously. He must be a clandestine observer. He must have them not make the slightest change in their routines. Perform autopsies on recently deceased new mothers, bloodied hands reaching into the genitals reeking and oozing with puss and ochor, then wash their hands with soap and water cursorily, which some skip, then they descend as if to hell to his clinic, the First. From a dark corner, he watches students examine pregnant women with hands washed hastily. Then he goes to Clinic #2 and observes hands of midwives untarnished with the byproducts of Autopsy.

     After an autopsy of his own, and after he washes his own hands with soap and water, he brings his hands to his nose. Inhale! Again, breathe in! There it is, that ever-present odor of cadaveric particles which had greeted him on his first day at Vienna Hospital and lingered throughout school, those two years operating beside Rokintansky, and played around his nostrils while he slept. It shot out to the priest who passed with his tinkling bell and then rushed back in to his bed. The odor of the process of mortal death was the natural odor of his wing of the hospital, certainly the Dead Room, Autopsy, Dissection. After an hour, Dr. Semmelweis inhales again. Still there! A second hour--the malodor lingers, sometimes for a longer time, sometimes shorter. If this is so, it also has not left the hands of medical students and attending physicians of the First Clinic, as well as those of attendants of all the maternity clinics around the world who first work on cadavers. He tells Lajos: 

"Cadaveric particles can be detected by their odor! They transfer from the corpse to the hands and remain despite soap and water washings. Then these same hands examine a woman approaching term and then deliver. In the end, dear friend, it is not the students who cause the Fever. It can be anyone, including myself--you, her, him and him--whoever carries cadaveric particles on the hands!"       "Deodorize the hands," he says at this time. "The whole problem is there."

     Semmelweis smelled germs fifty years before Pasteur saw them.

     Hardly into the second year of his Assistantship, Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis laid the foundation on which to discover the causes of puerperal fever--and infection in general! 

The book brims over with examples of Bart’s eloquence. It contains, as well, quotations about Giamatti from his colleagues in both academia and baseball, and from people familiar with his life from his earliest days growing up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where Dante and baseball were topics of conversation around the family dinner table. BART contains a wealth of images associated with Giamatti’s life ranging from a photograph of the gas station where Holyoke men and boys gathered to listen to the Red Sox games to a sampling of Italian art works and photography associated with his scholarly pursuits...a deft and balanced selection.”--Yale Magazine

"The mixing of the two voices, the translator and the explicator, works wonderfully. A winner, very good stuff, really.” Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian, Yale University.
"I just kept on reading it right through even though I had read the original many times. Anthony Valerio’s version really makes it new.--Rebecca West, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, University of Chicago.

"The immigrant’s path travels across time and space. Necessarily, it intersects with the lives of others, touching them, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes with more weight, but always in an affecting way. Anthony Valerio’s Immigrants include artists, artisans, some great, others not at well well-known. The immigrant is always both an individual and member of a mobile mass traversing the globe. This is why you will find multiple contributors here from different backgrounds and lands of origin. The great global and contemporary diaspora recalls others that have come before and this collection of portraits of immigrants includes migrations past and present that are loomed together in a great tapestry of stories. Like all great tapestries, not all the figures featured are human. That is why some of the immigrants are animals that have come to North America by way of many routes, some refugees of war. The lives brought together in IMMIGRANTS II have much to teach us of “humanity” in many forms.----Professor Ellen Nerenberg, Wesleyan University

"The private, woman-filtered experience of communal life, Valerio’s quintessential métier, the animating principal of his entire literary corpus. --George Guida, prof., nyc

This is his story of the improbable but profound recognition that ignited between him -- an "Olive" man, Italian-American writer -- and the acclaimed, doomed Black novelist and activist Toni Cade Bambara.

A powerful, funny novel. Preceded The Sopranos & Analyze This -

--the lives of such heroes and legends as Frank Sinatra, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Joe DiMaggio, Christoper Columbus and Rodolpho Valentino. Valerio's essay/inventions are as true as they are imaginary, as filled with fantasy as they are with amazing fact. In a kind of Italian Ragtime, we learn fact and spiritual truth about Italians as diverse as Mona Lisa and Mario Lanza--and as romantic as Valentino.