Brick: A Literary Journal Number 75, Summer 2005 www.brickmag.com ISBN 0-9687555-9-3 paper, 184 pages $12 (CDN)

Yesterday’s mail brought the current issue of Brick, the front cover shouting out “Our 75th Issue!”, a phrase which I suspect conceals a subtle subtext: “We’ve been around” (the subtext whispers between the syllables) “for 75 fun-filled issues; and you can trust us to hang around a long time yet”.

Yes, it seems to us that those three simple celebratory words are doing double duty, moonlighting as a bit of subliminal encouragement to bolster two-pages of overt encouragement just inside the magazine’s back cover where readers will find An Immodest Proposal soliciting them to pony up $195 (CDN) and become Sponsor Subscribers to this most illustrious of literary journals.

Buying a single newsstand copy of any magazine is like a date; an annual subscription is going steady. A ten year commitment? To quote from Brick’s written proposal:

It’s almost like marriage, only not as scary, and hell, if we like the first decade together, we can do it again.

But if you’re already married, wouldn’t a ten year Brick subscription be ‘almost like’ bigamy? As if anticipating that excuse the magazine opens with the following quote from “Camus’ Notebooks” by Susan Sontag:

Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generousity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover … that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar¹ — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savour rare emotions and dangerous sensations. And, as in life, so in art both are necessary, husbands and lovers. It’s a great pity when one is forced to choose between them.

It’s as if Brick had hired a professional psychologist as editor, whose sole instructions were to predict and refute all possible subscriber refusals. The temptation is almost too much to resist:

What do you get out of this? You get the magazine uninterrupted for an entire decade; you get your name in the magazine in our Sponsor Subscribers’ section for the entire period (just imagine all those people trying to get published in Brick, and there’s your name, beautifully typeset in our pages, for twenty issues in a row).

You’d be in fine company: the current list of Brick Sponsor Subscribers includes Annie Dillard, Anne Michaels, and Margie Gillis. Ask yourself this: how many other opportunities are you going to have to share a page with Annie Dillard for the next ten years?

You have until December 31, 2005 to justify the expense somehow.

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¹ “Unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar” — we’re thinking of adopting that as t&p’s official motto…