Last week, Dalya Benor brought The Pleasure Lists offline and into the “real world” at McNally Jackson, NYC, with an in-person workshop followed by readings from Emmeline Clein, Camille Sojit Pejcha, Whitney Mallett, Rachel Syme, Sophie Haigney and Lauren Servideo. Curious to know what all of this pleasure would look like in real life, we asked Emmeline Clein to document the evening in a photo diary.
Pleasure is a riddle, a risky bet, a conundrum, a crisis, a high and a sigh, simultaneously utterly private and totally obvious. Dalya Benor found herself fascinated by the mischievous, multiplying nature of pleasure, so she decided to crowdsource, putting out a “call to catalogue one’s pleasures,” in the form of her substack The Pleasure Lists. Benor culls contributions from currently living artists, writers, and girls about town like Marlowe Granados (pleasures include running away), Rachel Seville Tashjian (movies in the morning), Emily Sundberg (calling an uber black), Tyler Bainbridge (bowling), and Natasha Stagg (going to the Museum of Jurassic Technology), as well as dead members of the culturati who left lists of things they liked behind in journals and poems, from Roland Barthes (the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, too-cold beer) to Lorraine Hansberry (conversations with James Baldwin, television very late at night). Susan Sontag’s list included cinnamon, staying in hotels, pen-knives, Wagon-Lits (I had to look this up, it is apparently a Belgian train company known for its luxurious sleeping and dining cars), and Jews. Same!
On a frigid February evening, Benor brought the Pleasure Lists offline and into what we used to call ‘the real world’ at McNally Jackson Seaport for a “workshop in which people would have the chance to meditate on, and write their own Pleasure List” as well as live readings from authors invited to interpret pleasure however they chose, “showing us that pleasure is truly in the eye of the beholder,” as Benor told me. Comedian Lauren Servideo, Paris Review editor Sophie Haigney, New Yorker writer and author of the recent instructional (and very pleasurable) book on the epistolary tradition Rachel Syme, writer and editor of The Whitney Review Whitney Mallett, writer Camille Sojit Pejcha, and yours truly served as the night’s official readers. Over one hundred attendees spent an hour prior to the reading mingling, drinking, and writing their lists, which the bravest among them slipped into a fishbowl to be read aloud.
The aforementioned drinks were provided by the event’s sponsor, Warby Parker, and there is definitely a witticism to be written about seeing our pleasures clearly through DTC prescription lenses, but I’m not sure I’m the girl for that particular job. The job I was, in fact, commissioned to do here was a photo diary of this event, but it turns out I wasn’t quite the girl for that either, as I only remembered I was supposed to take pictures when I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night after the reading certain I’d forgotten something important. Sue me, I was living in the moment (pleasurable). All my thanks to the anonymous friends of readers and Dalya who sent me the following images when I texted them in a panic (manic texting is pleasurable in a masochistic sense, like oversharing or overdoing anything, really). As you will see, the crowd was “very brown haired girl coded,” in Mallett’s words, and majority the kind of people who “type in lowercase and were deemed ‘a pleasure to have in class,’” in Sojit Pejcha’s (those are compliments).
Dalya Benor, creator of The Pleasure Lists, introduced the event by reading the Bertolt Brecht poem that inspired her project. Brecht’s pleasures included ‘taking things in,’ ‘dialectics,’ and ‘being friendly,’ things that, now that I think about it, both readers and attendees method acted throughout the night. The power of a theme…or the malleability of girls and gays?
Whitney Mallett reading a wry, wily, highly pleasurable prose poem mourning the demise of in-flight magazines and writing jobs (a situation “which should mean more time for pleasure, but in effect means more e-girls with BPD”), raising awareness about the existence of an extremely evil coded couple comprised of a girlboss bomb company CEO married to an airline deregulation lobbyist turned Princeton Divinity School student, and recounting a spiky, kinetic, thrill-inducing frenemy-ship.
Lauren Servideo imagines that getting upgraded to first class on a flight is akin to one third of an orgasm, though it’s never happened to her personally. She also appreciates the ‘dampaldehyde’ smell of hairspray in humidity, the fetid scent of a house party in full swing, and watching Winona Ryder wear Marc Jacobs to her court date for shoplifting from Marc Jacobs.
Rachel Syme educating the crowd on the sybaritic potential of the boutiques in the basement of the Plaza, a full beat applied under fluorescent Sephora lighting while you’re gin tipsy, pillows designed for bathtubs, and the little known perfume Jenny Holzer co-created with Helmut Lang.
Sophie Haigney reading from her impassioned defence of much-maligned pleasures like the city of Boston and hazy IPAs.
Me reading my extended, traditionally emo and ultimately too alliterative riff on pleasure. I managed to make it about psychoanalysis, lying, flirting, friendship, and cutting?
Attendees were encouraged to write their own lists. Contributions ranged from the sacred mundane to the earnestly erotic. Sojit Pejcha astutely observed that “people love making lists…and people who making lists love eating ripe fruit and letting the juices run down their chin.”
Camille Sojit Pejcha wore an incredible fur hat, and she was not the only one in intriguing headwear, I spotted one (brunette) girl rocking a psychiatric medication bottle inspired claw clip. As Sojit Pejcha put it, the evening “felt pretty wholesome overall, so obviously I had to close the night with a story about a $12,000 sex party.”
Words by Emmeline Clein
