I've written a piece about the folks who sell Xmas trees on the streets of New York.

Turns out, sales are doing quite nicely this year, despite the doldrums everywhere else:

Molly, one of the northern horde of sidewalk Christmas tree vendors cheering us with their Green Mountain or Quebecois accents, has been a seasonal fixture at the corner of Broadway and 110th street in Manhattan for more than sixteen of her thirty-five years.
Customers may be cutting back in some areas, but Molly insists they’re not giving up their Christmas tree habit. “Some people are going to get a tree no matter what, but they might go for something a little cheaper, a little smaller,” she explained.

Now that Curator is dead, I'm turning my attention to the writing projects that have languished or that I've never had to time to even sketch out.

This afternoon, I'm doing my first interview for a book on Gen Y in the workplace that I will soon pitch to an agent. I'll get more specific when I've sold it!

Well, the news aggregation site I joined, The Curator, is now live.
The idea is that me and a few other geniuses cull the news for the best and most important content, summarize and link to it, and give folks a chance to scan the news and click through to the stuff that really interests them.
When I lived in France in the 80s and 90s, my close friend Claude Meunier used to work for a billionaire industrialist named Bouygues (yes, he of Bouygues Telecom). Claude's job was to prepare a stack of index cards summarizing the news of the day and deliver them to Bouygues at 5 in the morning. He would sit in the back of the limo next to Bouygues while the industrialist flipped through the deck, absorbing everything from international news to celebrity gossip, and answer any questions the guy might have.

Well, Bloomsbury is publishing Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex this month, and I'm one of the contributors.

You can order the book by clicking here.

My essay--actually, it's more like a rant--is about foot fetishism.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the essay:

Get in a cocktail party conversation about sexual turn-ons, and everything from hair to ass is fair game. Red, shiny, pulpy mouths are substitutes, preferable to some, for pussies. Legs are a vee-shaped embrace leading to the promised land. But feet? You mean those filthy things down there, pounding the pavement, collecting every imaginable smell and disease. Are you some kind of submissive wussy-man? Do you like to eat shit too? Do you want me to piss on you? How about a knuckle sandwich?

I attended a great lecture by Ben Marcus at Columbia University on Saturday.

It was Dean's Day, which is a day for Columbia alumni to come back and take some courses and mingle with one another.

Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String and also chairman of the writing program at the Columbia University graduate School of the Arts, where I also earned my MFA. Marcus has also shown me great kindness in the past, so I was looking forward to meeting him for the first time.

His lecture was mostly dedicated to defending the very idea of teaching creative writing, which is absurd. No one questions the painter's atelier--but I think that's because the atelier stems from long-held tradition and was originally tied to craft rather than art.