The Pleasure Lists Q&A: Sophie Haigney

Pleasures, Curated by editor and writer Sophie Haigney

We’re back with another installment of

The Pleasure Lists

: 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.

Pleasures, Curated by

Sophie Haigney

of The Paris Review

Sophie Haigney is the web editor at The Paris Review. She is working on her first book, a collection of essays about collecting.

Location: NYC

Social: @sophiehaigney

Pleasures

The city of Boston

I am going to begin with one of my most controversial opinions: the city of Boston is one of the greatest in America, and also the world. This is at odds with conventional wisdom, which is that Boston is stuffy, oddly conservative, and devoid of pleasure. The great Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, in her essay, “Boston”:

“In Boston, there is the utter absence of that wild, electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and streets, the restaurants, theaters, bars, hotels delicatessens, shops. In Boston, the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality…Boston is defective, out-of-date, vain, and lazy, but if you’re not in a hurry, it has a deep secret appeal.”

That deep secret appeal haunts me, though she’s right about all the rest too. What’s pleasant about Boston lies in what makes it unpleasant: its smallness and closeness and old-fashioned-ness. There are the tall redbrick houses for peering into, the Irish bars by Fenway park, the lengths of the esplanade along the Charles River, the closed-door libraries in Cambridge, and fact of the John Singer Sargeants in the museums. There is the way Boston wears its seasons: fall, of course which everyone notices, and the Common blanketed in snow with streetlights. But I only really enjoy the season of spring when I am in Boston, when white flowers are blooming on Pinckney street and the trees are bending down. It’s not wild and electric, but quiet and somber and very close to my heart.

Beer (IPA)

I am one of the last defenders of the India Pale Ale, which I came to like because it reached peak cool when I was in college. Everyone was adding hops to everything in 2015, and when it became legal for me to drink, I did not know enough about beer to say anything but “IPA.” At first, I thought they were bitter, but I went about acquiring the taste, and it has stuck with me, as many acquired tastes have. When I am at a bar I will still usually order “any IPA.” The recent conventional turn back toward light beer, to Modelos, Bud Light, Miller Lite, et. cetera, makes no sense to me. They taste like stale water with a tinge of beer. A real cold IPA in a frosty glass is by contrast one of life’s great joys. My friend Charlie introduced me to a game where you name your top three beers, like “beer in the shower,” or “beer you find in the back of your fridge that you didn’t know you had.” So I will name mine, a list within a list, and you can assume they are all IPAs, hazy, in a frosty pint glass. Top three beers: first beer on a Friday around 5 pm; beer on a summer Saturday in the middle of the afternoon while watching the world go by; and my very favorite, beer at the bottom of a ski slope when you are really, really tired and just warming up from the cold.

Not drinking beer

I have Lenten inclinations, which that I also love not drinking beer. Not drinking beer—or alcohol in general— for an extended period, a week or a month or a Lent, reminds me that addition to drinking beer, I really love not drinking beer. Both states are good, and I want to say equally so, but that’s not right, because the pleasures in fact depend on one another and are totally distinct. Not drinking beer has the particular pleasure that comes to me with self-discipline and delay. It is a reminder, too, that not all pleasures lie indulgence; sometimes there is great joy to be found in denial and constraint.

Jersey sheets

I have been told these sheets are “for babies.” Oh well. They are not aesthetically pleasing, but you feel like you are sleeping in a slipper. They are soft, warm, gentle, stretchy—childlike, maybe, but pure pleasure for an adult.

The particular color of orange in the canyons in the desert in southern Utah

There is nothing more to say about that, except that this color, and the memories of it, are essentially holy.

Mob movies

Here is something you can do if you’re feeling bad and you want to feel not exactly worse but are not quite ready to feel better: watch all three Godfather movies back-to-back in a forty-eight-hour window. Then you can watch some other movies, more or less in descending order of quality—The Departed, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Mystic River, and, if you can get it on DVD, State of Grace, starring Sean Penn and Robin Wright.

People often ask me why I won’t watch anything but mob movies. There are probably interesting psychological factors that I haven’t fully interrogated. But part of what I like, I think, is watching the magnification of everything that is horrible about being in a family or any kind of network of loyalty far beyond the point of “relatability,” beyond the point of the grotesque, beyond the pale.

Roasting a chicken on Sunday

I have strict rules, personally, about what the days of my week are for. I may break them sometimes—for instance, Mondays are normally “Me Mondays,” which is pretty self-explanatory. Sundays are for roasting a chicken. I do not roast a chicken every Sunday, and in fact I often cook something else, but the principle remains: the weekend should end on a long cooking project, one that is actually simple but a bit luxurious, and which can be mostly left alone on the stove or in the oven.

A roast chicken is a relatively inexpensive and practical meal for two, or even four, one that usually leaves me with leftovers for a Monday salad. But more than its practical implications, the roasting of a chicken on Sunday is about signaling the end of a week, and the beginning of a new one, and thus the crossing of a threshold. And the smell of a roasting chicken—what could really be better than that?