12/31/2022 0 Comments Gta london cityI have spent most of my life seeking out these connections and attempting to create my own. When the minds of the reader and writer perfectly and inimitably connect, objects, events and emotions become doubly vivid – more real, somehow, than real things. Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and take shelter in another. The last Xbox 360 I bought has plenty of companions: a GameCube, a PlayStation 2 and a PlayStation 3. Thus I enjoy the spendthrift distinction of having purchased four Xbox 360 consoles in three years, having abandoned the first to the care of a friend in Brooklyn, left another floating around Europe with parties unknown, and stranded another with a pal in Tallinn (to the irritation of his girlfriend). In Rome this took two months in Vegas two weeks in Tallinn two days. Shortly after arriving in Rome, Las Vegas and Tallinn, however, the lines of gameless resolve I had chalked across my mind were wiped clean. With every move I resolved to leave behind my video game consoles, counting on new surroundings, unfamiliar people and different cultures to enable a rediscovery of the joy I once took in my work. It has not helped that during the past three years I have, for what seemed like compelling reasons at the time, frequently upended my life, moving from New York City to Rome to Las Vegas to Tallinn, Estonia, and back, finally, to the United States. Games, meanwhile, are even more formally compelling. Three years into my predicament, my discipline remains awol. When this did not happen, I wondered if my intensified attraction to games and my desensitised attraction to literature were reasonable responses to how formally compelling games had quite suddenly become. I waited patiently for it to stroll back on to the farm, apologetic but invigorated. I knew the pace I was on was not sustainable and figured my discipline was treating itself to a rumspringa. These days I still manage to write, but the times I am able to do so for more than three sustained hours have the temporal periodicity of comets with near-earth trajectories.įor a while I hoped that my inability to concentrate on writing and reading was the result of a charred and overworked thalamus. These days I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon and spend my evenings playing video games. These days I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction – excepting those I was also reviewing – in the last year. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realise this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness. "Once upon a time" refers to relatively recent years (2001-2006), during which I wrote several books and published more than 50 pieces of magazine journalism and criticism – a total output of, give or take, 4,500 manuscript pages. Once upon a time I was, more or less, content. Once upon a time I did occasionally binge on games, but these binges rarely had less than a fortnight between them. Once upon a time I played video games almost exclusively with friends. Once upon a time I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down "only" a thousand words. O nce upon a time I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon and spent most of my evenings reading.
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