VQR Online

Christopher Nogy’s Passion for Medieval Instruments

Do you know the poems of Max Jacob?
Do you know Talese, Gay? Swenson, May? 
Do you know Goldfinger, alias Gert Fröbe?
Do you know Robinson, Sugar Ray?

When I talk to my students about living for compassion, they tend to be quite interested. But few of them have ever contemplated this sort of life before. Like the life of courage and the life of thought, the life of compassion seems to be...

“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” Quoth the raven. Why not quoth the curlew? Quoth the grackle? Quoth the—well, the crow?

Whatever it took to make it an arduous trip, and of course you couldn’t say the obvious, you had to smile and say there were worse problems blah blah blah. The mediocre glass of wine for thirteen dollars at the airport bar was one of them...

As we discussed some of his favorite authors—from Heinrich von Kleist and Virginia Woolf to Jack Kerouac and Jayne Anne Phillips—Doctorow asked: “What can you steal from these writers?”

When you parted the muslin curtains, the white branches of winter trees became the arms of girls in their spring frocks in April and May.

the wind carries 
its empty package 
through the streets

Syrian Kurds are trying to build a leftist revolution in the midst of a civil war. Is it a new Middle East, or just another fracture?

When he thought about it, he could see that this thing with Alexa Jamison was a betrayal of the idea of what Sonya and he had been: the romance of that. Such a sweet beginning seems always to create a following inertia: the two families...