The Pleasure Lists Q&A: Emmeline Clein
Pleasures, Curated by author Emmeline Clein
We’re back with another installment of
: Pleasures, Curated.I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy getting to know members of the Pleasure Lists community and what makes their Pleasures tick.
Emmeline Clein will be reading at our first-ever Pleasure Lists live event on February 10th at McNally Jackson. I hope you’ll join us — and in the meantime, you can read more of her Pleasures below. More info on the event below, and get tickets here.
Pleasures, Curated by
Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger & Harm (Knopf US, Picador UK). Her chapbook, Toxic, was published by Choo Choo Press. You can read her writing in The Paris Review, The Nation, The Yale Review, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She has taught writing at Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
Location: New York City
Social: @emmelc
Pleasures
Extremely convoluted, overly-long stories told in far too much detail at dinner parties, or any type of party. Critically, I am defining a party as any occasion on which two or more people are conversing energetically, giggling (spit-take level hilarity preferable but not required), and revealing something they maybe shouldn’t. There are internecine pleasures to be had here, endlessly electric roles to be played in this dynamic: entranced audience, chaos jester, investigatory journalist, consummate exaggerator taking that show on the road the next night. To be clear, I know internicine connotes conflict, tends toward the destructive, but isn’t psychoanalysis back? Storytelling staves off the death drive while sating it, in my experience.
The scent of the air on the jet bridge when you get off the plane in New Orleans. Wet, weighty, stringently humid, incredibly difficult to describe but infinitely simple in your mouth. Gasoline, damp leaves, salt, inspiring sybaritic gaits on the way to baggage claim, ensuring no one is in a rush. Two sub-pleasures: not checking a bag so your leisurely stroll can get you straight into that air, taking the car directly to Domilise’s, Clancys’s, or Neyow’s (depending on the time of day) before wherever you’re staying, and riding with the windows down despite the heat.
Meeting someone who finishes your riff. Or just gets it, generally. Finding a friend or a flirt who spots the punch line before you’ve even said half your set-up, speaking to someone who makes you laugh so suddenly you aren’t surprised at all. When the cadence of someone’s speech starts sounding like a deranged psalm or a stand-up soliliquy, and your interruption isn’t a hitch in the rhythm but the missing note.
When a friend lends you a book that makes you want to read everything that author ever wrote.
If you are like me, and you don’t believe in hobbies (sorry, cancel me), this one is especially life-affirming because your newfound obsession gives you something to talk about when someone is monologuing at you about their ceramics/woodworking/gardening/knitting journey. More importantly and more earnestly, a loved one’s lens on life is least smudged when you’re reading their favorite books, and understanding the nuances of a friend’s taste for sentences or moral stances or strange plots is simply special.
A perfect Rockaway beach day. Giant iced coffee + cigarettes while driving 1-4 friends/acquaintances/lovers to the water. If it’s a weekend, have an amazing epiphany that you must be a truly good person because God gives you a legal parking spot. Bring a book you intend to read and end up gabbing so much you get sand in every crevice of it even though you only read three pages. Order a nutcracker, stay longer than the group on the sand next to you, drive home at sunset.
Tact. Just kidding! Tact is totally respectable, indispensable in certain situations, a skill. But it’s a scalpel for social dynamics, and I prefer my interpersonal pleasures serrated. Being gauche is a thrill, and can even be construed as class warfare if you phrase it right. Disturb a snob, ask an inappropriate question (apologies are allowed, even encouraged), catch a cool girl off guard with kindness, eat off someone else’s plate.
Voice memos with same-generation friends, emails with intergerational friends, carphone conversations with any-age friends. Controversial opinion: being really addicted to podcasts where two people are basically just vibing out is ultimately embarrassing, please call a friend. However, I will admit that sometimes the moment calls for three to twelve minutes of tea that just washes over you, plus allows for rewinds if you zone out (rude on the phone). Voice memos are perfect for this, and have the added benefit of offering what saving real voicemails used to do, which is the sound of someone’s voice available when you miss them. Emailing with women over sixty is a real lesson in style, these queens are writing prose poems by complete accident. I have nothing against rolling calls in general, and have been known to answer the phone at an inopportune moment (gauche), but rolling calls while on a long drive is an unrivaled approach to telecommunication.
Charbroiled or fried oysters on an extraordinarily hot day. I don’t care if you’re sweating and the plate is steaming, be brave, burn your tongue, a blister is a melting memory.
Watching extremely idiotic television with incredibly intelligent people. If the phrases ‘The Wall Contract,’ ‘harmonize or mute’ or ‘#WTFthatending’ mean anything to you, you know what I’m talking about. Game shows with washed up hosts and inconceivable premises, spy thrillers starring girlboss moms moonlighting as mercenaries and twink snipers, mysteries in which a semi-tertiary character explains the show’s entire plot to the protagonist as though they are a seven-year-old child in the penultimate episode, anything ‘presented by Harlan Coban.’ In 2025, smooth brain memes, empty-headed bimbotokkers, and yearning for a lobotomy might be stale, but what could be so wrong with entering a fugue state? If you have friends who can explain the nature of Byzantine and scandalous political conflicts with rizz, riff about obscure literature, or are otherwise simply smart, it’s time to sit down, order in, and watch something you will never forget consuming and never remember a single detail of.
Finding leftover ephemera in a used book. A prior reader’s inscription to their sister, someone’s scrawled to-do list, a draft of a love letter written on a dry cleaning ticket doing double duty as a bookmark. I recently discovered that last one in a copy of Vivian Gornick’s Against the Novel of Love in an ironic twist (though the book isn’t so much against romance itself as against its usefulness as a metaphor for self-discovery under the emotionally decrepit conditions of our dying and decadent society). Still, the person’s fervor, crossed-out and rewritten, made me optimistic for a fleeting moment.
What does Pleasure mean to you?
Pleasure is buoyant, taut but tender, grinning. It isn’t a virtue but it has virtues: teaching us to appreciate what our culture doesn’t––ephemerality, langour, uncertainty. It’s risky, because it often relies on other people, but if you ask me, that’s the best part.
Who do you want to see next? Send me suggestions for who to feature in the next Q&A!
What Is “Pleasures, Curated”?
Each week, a new Pleasure-seeker will document their personal Pleasures and ruminate a bit on what Pleasure means to them. True to
style, I keep the list-maker’s je ne sais quoi in as much as I can — only minor editorial changes are made when necessary. I do this intentionally so that the writer’s inner world really comes through. The style of the list says as much about the writer as the list itself.Read Previous Q&A’s:
Why submit a list?
Pleasure Lists are a summary of what you need, want, or have, or see at a particular moment in time. They are a survey, an overview, a summary of the crucial facts of the state of one aspect of your life. It’s a kind of blueprint that can be a guide to the future.
Mull it over and if you’re moved to, send me a list.
Questions? Comments? Send any recommendations or suggestions for what you’d like to see in these newsletters my way. I’d love to hear more about what you’re currently finding pleasure in.
Join the chat below to connect with other members of the Pleasure List community:
Please share this newsletter! The Pleasure Lists is meant to be a collaborative project that calls people from all over to write, read, and share their pleasures — a global community of artists, writers, and pondering minds alike.
 | A guest post by
|