Simply because I have been delighted by it, and can’t recommend the magazine highly enough, and because today is Robbie Burns’ Day, I offer these further (and final) “wee drams” from issue 71 of Brick: imbibe!

• I read everything. Books were also a drug — a way out, as well as in. I learned to love the dream of books, and still love it. If nothing else in my life, I have become a good reader. I had no one to discipline my study, still don’t. I will usually read several books at once, biographies, natural histories, novels, all mixed up together. Comic books, newspapers, cereal boxes — I read like some people breathe. It’s an obsessive behaviour — an amateur psychiatrist might tag it a need to escape the world, a variation on whisky. Myself, I think I read to enter the dialogue of the world, to confront the forces beyond my skin, and thus learn what is under my skin. I read to live. — an extract from Brian Brett’s Uproar’s Your Only Music

• The prose he left behind is artful in its lack of obvious contrivance. “I put aside all thought of fine writing,” he recalled. “I wanted to write without any frills of language, in as bare and unaffected a manner as I could. I had so much to say that I could afford to waste no words.” — George Featherling on W. Somerset Maugham

• Had I not become a writer, I would probably have grown up to become an even geekier version of myself, majoring in some arcane branch of the computer sciences, living alone, unlaid, debating the merits of ninth-level magic-users with the proprietor of some on-line comic-book store. — Griffin Poetry Prize winner Christian Bök reflects on his lost career

• The spine is a splendid idea in theory, keeping all those nerve impulses cozy inside a flexing protection of bone — except that the bone itself can be a problem — and the disks between the bone — and the layers of muscle surrounding — and we aren’t really designed to stand upright, evolution lagging somewhat since our days in the trees — and your vertebrae can suddenly feel so fragile when you consider that everything passes through them, this is how you keep moving, and how you keep breathing and how you keep swallowing — so why put it all on one place? I mean, isn’t it simply reckless of Someone to build us this way, if not intentionally sadistic? — from A. L. Kennedy’s piece “Swimming Pools”

• Realistically, my options beyond “variations on a theme of typing” would run the gamut from Bag Lady to Dead Bag Lady. — A. L. Kennedy reflects on what she might have been if not a writer

• Reading a work of literature, particularly a work of poetry, in translation is more like making love through a blanket. For despair I will do even this, but it’s not the same. Now to be kinder to the art of translation, I will say that it is perhaps like playing a violin concerto on the piano. It can be done. It can be done successfully on one strict condition. Never, ever try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque. — from Ramona Koval’s excellent interview with Amos Oz

• To me, an opening section of any work of literature is a little bit like the beginning of [Chekov’s] “The Lady with a Little Dog”. You lure, you seduce the little dog with a bone so that the little dog gives you the pretext to start communicating with the lady. To make a pass at the lady. No little bone: no dog. No little dog: no lady. No lady: no story. That’s the rule of thumb. So you have to start from some kind of seduction. And I believe there is a lot in the comparison between the reader-writer relationship and lovers’ relationship. It is after all a pass between total strangers, especially when you read a novel by someone you have never read before. You have to make a pass. You have to create a certain note. Sometimes a false note. Sometimes the opening section is a total trap; sometimes it is misleading. But it is always a beginning of a relationship, something to be remembered. — more from the interview with Amos Oz