Episode 1260: Hugo

Had an interesting time in the Mead Gallery revisiting some of the works in The Indiscipline Of Painting. Now I think I don't really need the catalogue, I just want pictures of selected artworks. Wrote three short poems inspired by three separate works. Went to the Post Room before catching Hugo at the WSC, thinking that it was the remainder of my order from The Book Depository. Turns out it was Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy, posted to me by Scott. So I've got to start reading that for review now. I did finish William Winfield Wright's Cosmonauts yesterday, while eating dinner in Varsity before service, so I could probably write the review for that tomorrow. Am also making my way slowly through the book version of I Wrote This For You, which moves me in the same way that Hugo did. That film gets curiously heartbreaking at certain points. It's basically a family film with Gallic sensibilities, directed by Martin Scorsese. Based on Brian Selznick's novel The Invention Of Hugo Cabret, which happened to be on my reading list for EN978 last term, it's a movie about how movies came to be, and it's incredibly beautiful. Asa Butterfield puts the intensity he brought to the role of Mordred in Merlin to good use here, and Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès is also impressive. (Interestingly, the novel I recently read, Mathias Malzieu's The Boy With The Cuckoo-Clock Heart, also has a Méliès connection.) I will say that Scorsese's film has made me want to read the book on which it's based, which sounds like it's a gorgeous production in itself, with more than half of it consisting of pictures.