{"id":15660,"date":"2007-11-08T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-08T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2007\/11\/08\/today-was-95-triumph\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:49:45","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:49:45","slug":"today-was-95-triumph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2007\/11\/08\/today-was-95-triumph\/","title":{"rendered":"Today was 95% triumph\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hame.land\/blog\/blog_files\/endofday.jpg.webp\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width:0\" height=\"232\" alt=\"endofday\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1049\/today-was-95-triumph01.jpg.webp\" width=\"149\" border=\"0\"><\/a> <br \/><font color=\"#800000\"><strong>&#8230;and 5% <em>suck<\/em>.<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">(But I&#8217;m not getting into that last bit.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">I bumped into my (amazing, great, beautiful) poet friend <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elspethmurray.com\/\">Elspeth Murray<\/a> this afternoon, who spontaneously invited me to be a special guest at a writing workshop she was presenting this evening for one of the ginormous financial firms in the area.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">So at 5PM I entered, for the first time, one of those hallmark modern Edinburgh financial buildings near my house &#8212; the ones that look like snare drums made of beige sandstone &#8212; and met four people from the writing group she&#8217;s been leading there. It was an honour to meet those interesting people, talk with them about writing, and leave them with some of the things I&#8217;ve figured out.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">Writing is such a gift: imagining how to describe the things you see and think is like getting to live twice at once.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">So having mentioned that tonight I was going to start chapter eleven of <em>Finitude<\/em>, I had to be my word and do it. I&#8217;d made an outline though not nailed down specific scenes, but I went to a pub, bought a pint, and, just as I told the others this evening, when I made a space for the story and just watched the &#8220;skull cinema&#8221; in my head (as monologist Spalding Gray called it), it was there, playing out for me:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\"><em>&#8220;They must have a map or something in here,&#8221; said Jeremy. &#8220;We can find her when we get there. All that matters is that we get there first.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>&lt;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>p&gt;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1049\/today-was-95-triumph12.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\"><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;and 5% suck. (But I&#8217;m not getting into that last bit.) I bumped into my (amazing, great, beautiful) poet friend Elspeth Murray this afternoon, who spontaneously invited me to be a special guest at a writing workshop she was presenting this evening for one of the ginormous financial firms in the area. So at 5PM [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}