On a chilly day in February, at McNally Jackson’s Seaport outpost, Dalya Benor brought her project, The Pleasure Lists, into the incandescent glow of the ‘real world.’ There, under the bookstore’s soft lights, pleasures were written, read, and revealed. A gathering that felt like an ancient symposium reimagined for the twenty-first century, with cocktails instead of amphorae and texted photos instead of frescoes.
Benor’s project is simple and sensuous: a call to catalogue one’s pleasures. This started as a digital experiment, a Substack newsletter that turned lists into small, sparkling altars. Writers, artists, and wanderers of New York contributed desires both grand and minute. Natasha Stagg’s joy in the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Roland Barthes’ pleasure in too-cold beer. Susan Sontag’s affection for pen-knives and Wagon-Lits. The lists were both serious and sly, a curated anthropology of craving. That night, Benor brought the impulse offline, inviting the audience to consider what wanting looks like when spoken aloud.
The evening unfolded like a slow exhale. First, a reading from Bertolt Brecht’s poem that inspired the project. Brecht’s pleasures were spare and direct: taking things in, dialectics, being friendly. It felt fitting, this small invocation of restraint before the night opened into more decadent territory.
Whitney Mallett read a prose poem that was both eulogy and elegy, mourning the disappearance of in-flight magazines, remembering the thrill of a certain kind of disposable culture. Her words sketched strange couples and stranger dynamics—a frenemy-ship that cut like glass, a bomb CEO turned divinity student.
Lauren Servideo’s contribution drifted between humor and longing. She imagined an upgrade to first class as a kind of orgasmic prelude, an unattainable luxury. Her pleasures were more tactile: the hairspray-thick air of house parties, Winona Ryder’s courtroom defiance in Marc Jacobs.
Rachel Syme explored the opulence of basement boutiques, gin-tipsy explorations under fluorescent lights. She recounted the perfect indulgence of pillows designed for bathtubs, of beauty discovered in hidden, glimmering corners. Sophie Haigney defended the soft pleasures often maligned: hazy IPAs, the defiance of loving Boston.
Between readings, the audience mingled, wrote their own lists, slipped them into a fishbowl. The bravest were read aloud. There were the sweet and the sacrilegious, the funny and the shy. Someone confessed the pleasure of ripe fruit and juice running down their chin. Another listed their preference for peeling off a plastic screen cover. Camille Sojit Pejcha noted, “people who like making lists love eating ripe fruit.”
Text by Cici Thompson
12. MARCH. MMXXV. PLUM
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