Kevin Hayes

In the smell of bread

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Garfield Weston, longtime head of George Weston Limited, Canada’s largest food company, was born in the apartment above his father’s Toronto bread factory in February 1898. BreadYears later, he recounted a family story of how his father, George Weston, brought him down to the bakery floor, shortly after his birth, to put him “in the smell of bread.”

Bertoia Screen in NYC

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Via Corinne Robbins, a look at a restored sculpture in NYC. Sixteen feet tall and seventy feet across, once a screen in Gordon Bunshaft’s Manufacturers Hanover branch bank, it takes up the entire back wall of the second floor of the Joe Fresh clothing store. I like the plentiful and powerful texture and its large presence as an element in the room.

Dulce et Decorum est

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Pro Patria
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Photo by Ian Parkes.