Anyone who was recently a nine-year-old boy shed at least a mouse-sized tear last week, when Brian Jacques passed away at age 71. He was the author of the Redwall series, which was, in the pre-Potter era, the best set of chunky addictive novels a kid could get a hold of.
Until the February of his eleventh year, Joseph Cohen felt an inordinate kind of sympathy for all earthly things he encountered, even—and in some moods, especially—for inanimate objects.
Our guns were semi-automatic, which means you could shoot as fast as you pulled the trigger, and even an amateur like myself found myself reeling off three or four paintballs a second. I could feel every individual shot through its reverberations—no real recoil to speak of, but a satisfying pneumatic thwunk as the ball hurtled through the barrel.
I am not entirely sure that Kanye West knows how a phoenix works. He does, however, know how to make a gorgeous, self-indulgent, gorgeously self-indulgent piece of art.
