“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” ― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

aaknopf:

Raymond Carver (1938-1988), was a poet before he was celebrated as a writer of short stories. Here is “Eagles,” from his 1985 collection Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

Eagles

It was a sixteen-inch ling cod that the eagle
dropped near our feet
at the top of Bagley Creek canyon,
at the edge of the green woods.
Puncture marks in the sides of the fish
where the bird gripped with its talons!
That and a piece torn out of the fish’s back.
Like an old painting recalled,
or an ancient memory coming back,
that eagle flew with the fish from the Strait
of Juan de Fuca up the canyon to where
the woods begin, and we stood watching.
It lost the fish above our heads,
dropped for it, missed it, and soared on
over the valley where wind beats all day.
We watched it keep going until it was
a speck, then gone. I picked up
the fish. That miraculous ling cod.
Came home from the walk and—
why the hell not?—cooked it
lightly in oil and ate it
with boiled potatoes and peas and biscuits.
Over dinner, talking about eagles
and an older, fiercer order of things.

Learn more about Raymond Carver’s Book Title and browse other titles by Raymond Carver.

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…and oh, hey, another Cavafy audio bonus arrives today.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” ― T.S. Eliot

Happy birthday, Richard Ford (February 16th, 1944). 

Ford is a novelist and short story writer. His works include The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, Canada, among others. In 1995 he won the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Pulitzer Prize award for his work Independence Day.

Ford is from Jackson, Mississippi. He has written for the magazine Sports Illustrated, he edited the 2007 New Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the Library of America’s two-volume edition of the selected works of fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty.