The Year of Writing Dangerously

52 Posts About Pleasure

Dear Friends,

This is my 52^nd post at The Pleasure Principle!

It’s been a year of writing dangerously, for the subject of pleasure is always subversive and carries with it a certain stigma. Pleasure suggests selfishness, hints at decadence and smells of sex. In these short weekly essays, I’ve hoped to rehabilitate pleasure and lead readers to consider new pleasures, like sneezing or watching water or having pockets in a dress.

Pleasure may be transient, but many happy moments make a happy day!

One of my sons says that The Pleasure Principle is like a gratitude journal, and although that’s not my language or intention, I’m grateful for the thought.

Looking back over the year, my favorite posts are:

Final Pleasures

Escaping Your Comfort Zone

The Big O (What Makes it So Big?)

The Pleasure of Clothing, Part 2 (my attempted fling with ChatGPT).

To my surprise, last week’s post, Waxing Nostalgic, drew more likes and comments (many privately) than ever before.

My riskiest post was Sudden Money, for people usually conceal their finances. The danger of self-revelation only sped me onward, for transgression has always fired my engine.  

All posts are available at https://catherinehiller.substack.com

I decided this newsletter would drop every Tuesday at 11:11 am, ET. I chose Tuesday because it’s generally a light day, when people might spare the four or five minutes it could take to read one of these posts. We are all over-saturated with free content (a recent subscriber also gets 120 other Substacks). I’ll take every advantage I can to connect.

Why 11:11? For me it’s a magic number, when all the ones line up, and for decades, whenever I glance at a clock and happen to see all those ones (I’m not “allowed” to wait for it!) I’ve made it a point to freeze, stop doing anything else, and simply savor the moment until 11:12. Pleasure is all about savoring the moment. My fetishizing 11:11 gives me a deadline each Tuesday.

This self-imposed deadline also has its dangers, for it somehow works best that I do a first draft in one sitting, and I routinely postpone that sitting until Sunday afternoon or later. Often, I write the post late Monday night. On Tuesday morning I reread it and find a suitable photo somewhere. Often, I use my own photos, though I also use free collections like Unsplash and OpenVerse.

In my first post, I wrote about various things: a surprising study that shows people’s happiness rises until about age 72; a shout-out to writers who shocked me when I was young; and how gray hair has suddenly become chic. By the second post, “Too Much Pleasure,” about hedonic adaptation, I was writing a single short essay, which I have done ever since. For a few initial weeks I also served up a “Random Tip” for better living (put a single flower in your bathroom!), but I dropped that when I ran out of tips, however random.  

For a while, I had a list of things I might write about, but by June the unwritten topics seemed stale, and since then, I’ve mostly winged it on Mondays, ferreting out a subject on the fly, inspired by the events of the day or the week. Luckily, many things relate to pleasure.

The thrill is finding out what I have to say about a subject, diving into my brain for the morsels I will masticate! I just saw that last spring I wrote to a reader that writing these pieces are the happiest hours in my week.

Nonetheless, I am now going to take a short hiatus from Substack so I can concentrate on other projects (principally a novel, Wife and Girlfriend), and so I don’t get habituated to writing only short pieces. While these posts don’t take much actual time, they somehow occupy a lot of mental space. When I schedule a post, I feel, “There! I’ve accomplished something this week!” And I tend not to do much more.

Indeed, I’ve published very little this year, except for my novel, Cybill Unbound, on February 14, which I mainly wrote years ago, and which this Substack was initially intended to support. Of course, it’s evolved very differently.

I did manage to write, and publish, one longer piece, “The Lost Art of Flirtation,” which appeared this week in Next Avenue, the PBS newsletter for people over 50:

https://www.nextavenue.org/the-lost-art-of-flirtation/

I’m sorry the editor removed the following 2 paragraphs.

First removed paragraph, early in the piece:

Quin, in Mary Gaitskill’s new novella This is Pleasure, says: “I flirted. That’s all it was. I did it to feel alive without being unfaithful.” Nonetheless, he is ruined for a pinch here, a touch there. Mature women might simply remove that hand, maybe slap it, and move on, but younger women are not so forgiving.

And what would have been the second to last paragraph:

But one group of people is still flirtatiously inclined. Gay men still flirt, at least the ones I meet. At parties, they are lively and engaged, easily slipping into a teasing mode, even with straight women. That’s why we find them delightful! By their animation and intensity, they acknowledge our appeal, but their basic desire for men is the ultimate “if only.”

Are these paragraphs controversial or offensive? Will anybody please explain?

It’s always a treat to hear from you! Oddly, my best friends rarely, if ever, comment or like, but some others regularly chime in with a heart or a sentence. You know who you are, and I’m grateful to you! Other friends and acquaintances have written once or twice, letting me know that at least sometimes they’re here. And I’m thrilled to hear from strangers and get new subscribers—five of you this week! I’m not exactly going viral, but no one seems to peel away.

I was recently at a political event, and one acquaintance said, “Oh, by the way, I love your newsletter!” Two others chimed in, “I do, too!” None had ever even thrown me a like, so I was pleasantly surprised. Some people monetize their Substack newsletters, but mine is free, so my only reward, besides learning my own mind, is to hear back from readers.

As Becky Tuch writes in LitMagNews (which I find compelling even though I neither read nor submit to literary magazines): “As an aside, we should never underestimate what a small note of encouragement can mean to someone. [Your] notes meant the world to me.”

If you’ve been on this journey with me, consider clicking on the heart . . . or dropping me a few words about why you read The Pleasure Principle--or what you’d like me to write about when I return, probably in February. You can do this privately, by simply replying to this email.

Or you can make your comment public through the app. If you’re on a phone, toward the top of the email you are given the option to “READ IN APP.”  Do so! Then, at the bottom of the piece, you are asked to LEAVE A COMMENT. This doesn’t work as easily on my Windows laptop, because you can’t read it in the app, so you must first read the piece, and then scroll up and hit the quote bubble. It will send you to a place where you can leave a comment but at that point you can’t easily get back to the piece for reference. But enough about all that.  

It's time to hang the mistletoe, light the menorah, and anticipate giving and feasting! I hope you savor  many pleasures this holiday season.

I already miss you and this writing practice!