Bex's Christmas Gift Guide: Bonus Totes Amaze Edition

I had only planned to do three Christmas gift guides this year but since I posted the last guide, I've spotted a couple of cool tote bags. I included one in my gift guide for girls but I also culled a couple of others from my original longlists, so I thought I'd do a special round-up of my favourite tote bags. These make great gifts: they're stylish, light, eco-friendly, easy to wrap/mail, and you can even put several smaller Christmas gifts inside them — definitely much cooler than a stocking!

Bags for readers and writers
1.  Kate Spade New York for Strand canvas tote. $12.95. Stand Books in New York are famous for their tote bags, which are ubiquitous in Manhattan and beyond but Kate Spade's collaboration with Strand is a much more colourful, girly version. It's also a nice way to give someone a Kate Spade bag without breaking the bank.

2. Daunt Books totes. £1.50 and £8. When I first moved to Marylebone, I realised I had to buy a new it bag. Fortunately, the Daunt totes, which I've spotted in Cannes, New York, and beyond, as well as well as in the quartier, are a bargain at only £1.50 for the smaller, natural cotton version and £8 for the larger, sturdier, green version (which also has an interior pocket for your phone or keys). If you buy enough books, you may also get one of the bags thrown in free. Either way, I use my green tote almost every time I do a big shop and it's showing no signs of wear and tear. 

Edit: I spotted someone on Marylebone High Street today with a dark fuchsia version of the large tote, which looked totes amaze, as they say in Chelsea, apparently.

3. Vintage typewriter tote from TheBoldBanana via Etsy. $10. Perfect for a writer — or would-be writer.

Stylish sacs
4. Grey alphabet tote from Oliver Bonas. £12.50. These totes have a bright yellow zipper, which looks gorgeous with the light grey fabric of the bag (very Philippe Starck) and provides extra security for your belongings.

5. 'My other bag is made of solid gold' tote from Rob Ryan. £22.95. This double-sided tote has the same anti-bling slogan and star on both sides, blue on one side and pink on the other. Blue and pink are my favourite colours, so this would go with all my outfits! Ryan's contrary 'I love what you hate' design is also nice.

6. Liberty print tote. £20. These bags are a relatively inexpensive way of buying a Liberty print accessory. I really like the subtle band of print at the top of the bag and in the lining. Another version of this tote has the print on the straps and side panels (£15).

Totes for foodies and oenophiles 
7. Bordeaux wine tote from Maptote. $13. These totes are the perfect size for slipping in a nice smooth red and would be a great way of making a bottled gift more interesting. Maptote also has different designs for other regions.

8. Pun-tastic tote from Puncontrollable via Etsy. $17. Puncontrollable's totes have minimalist designs and cute captions; 'whisky business' and 'you Chinook me all night long' word work well for a gourmand.

Miscellaneous
9. Modern Toss tote from Magma Books. £5.95. This bag, which displays the command, "Buy more shit or we're all f*cked," may well have been commissioned by George Osborne.

10. Totes for geeks from Our Shop. £9 and £12. This tote with red or blue grid lines would make a nice present for anyone who has a bit of a graph paper obsession. This 'geek' tote makes a more obvious statement.

O Bright-Eyed Hope, My Morbid, Fancy Cheer — Bright Star Review

I thought it was appropriate to spend my last night as a 25-year-old watching a film about a poet who died at the age of 25. What better than to put some perspective on my thankfully un-TB-threatened world, eh? Perhaps it wasn't the happiest way to pass the evening but it was a warm, sensuous, engaging film nonetheless.

Jane Campion's film Bright Star tells the story of the last three years of John Keats's life and of his relationship with Fanny Brawne. In some ways, it's a lot like Love Story: girl meets boy, they fall in love but their differing social statuses keep them apart and in the middle of this struggle, one of them dies young. 

Bright Star is the same length as Glorious 39 but unlike the fast-paced, tension-filled movie I saw on Thursday, Bright Star is languorously slow, lush and voluptuous. In some ways, Keats's inevitable death isn't enough of a denouement because, while this is tragic, much of the film is spent with Fanny and Keats unable to fully express their love for each other with only short bursts of time when they can be happy together interspersed with their physical and emotional separation. "We've woven a web together," Keats says (approximately), "and while it's attached to the world, it's quite separate from the world."

Fanny's family aren't rich but they are comfortable. She and her widowed mother and younger brother and sister live in a nice enough house with servants and they eventually move into half of the rambling Hampstead estate where Keats also resides, intermittently. Her very sweet mother wants Fanny to be happy but equally thinks that her daughter needs to marry someone better placed to support her than the impoverished poet whose work is, as yet, unacclaimed. Keats' best friend and self-proclaimed protector, Charles Brown, also does his best to keep the pair apart but, of course, to no avail.

What girl could resist a dashing young poet reading her his beautiful poems amid a glorious, bluebell-filled forest? Fanny Brawne certainly couldn't and despite the warnings, plunged right in — to Keats's heart, rather than the Hampstead ponds. The film is, for the most part, gorgeously shot: lush green forests, a room filled with colourful, exotic butterflies, the bright dresses Fanny wears that she has made herself (they may be stylish but they aren't very flattering, although with Abbie Cornish wearing them, that doesn't really matter), and the endless letters oozing love and folded up small so that more words would fall out as they are unfolded. It's always sunny, even in autumn where the sun breaks through the orange leaves.

And then Keats becomes very ill. TB, it seems. This adds a whole new level of difficulty to the relationship between him and Fanny, when their situation was complicated enough anyway. His friends, including Brown, insist that he head south to the warmer climes of Italy, where he might recuperate. This entails a painful goodbye scene in Keats's bedroom where he says he "won't see her again on this earth." Fanny begs him to stay but he can't; his friends have paid his passage, he says, and he can't let them down. Probably, he just didn't want her to watch him fading further and dying. Instead, they slip into their other world and imagine the house they would live in when he returns and the life they would lead.

After he leaves, the film becomes very grey, lifeless and lethargic. No more flowery meadows, no more butterflies, no more laughter. And this heavy sadness continues until Brown breaks the news that Keats has died. Abbie Cornish is brilliant in this scene, her anguished sobs are truly heart-wrenching and she struggles to breathe, perhaps in sympathy with Keats's damaged lungs. After two hours of the relationship building up tantalisingly slowly, it ends rather suddenly with Fanny walking out alone into the snow. Monochrome again. None of the loud, cheerful music of the opening sequence. Just silence. And the end.

Not a happy film but a bright one with the richness and sensory detail contrasting with the air of wistfulness, regret and despair that is usually hovering in the background. Both Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats, portray the characters sensitively and warmly. And on a windy, rainy Friday night, Bright Star, was an enjoyable watch.

Keeping Tabs on The Tab

The Tab, the new-ish Cambridge University tabloid-style news outlet, hadn't entered my radar until I heard its "Totty" section being mocked on The News Quiz and criticised in most of the rest of the country's papers. I don't particularly have a problem with hot, female Cambridge undergrads getting some of their kit off if they want to and the fuss over this seemed a little excessive. One piece posted on the website today did catch my attention, however: "Cambridge vs Bridgeford".

I initially noticed the piece because it was clear from the title that it was going to be about Trinity, ITV's Oxbridge-inspired, OTT cliché fest — a programme which can surely only appeal to Oxbridge students past and present. However, when I read the rest of Charlotte Wu's post, I realised that it bore more than a passing resemblance to a blog post I wrote about the show about a month ago. There are some similarities in the content of my post and the Tab piece, including:

• comments about students discussing break-downs of A-level results and Christian tea parties.
• the fact that lowly fresher Charlotte (AKA token Christian)'s lowly room is right next door to the luxurious digs of the Dandelion Club president.
• the fact that the token Christian is a bit of a keeno.
• shenanigans with hot, Swedish bedders.
• references to "the peasants".
• a criticism of the fact that the Dandelion Club wouldn't wear such ugly formal attire all the time.

Of course, although a lot of people have visited my blog having searched for "Trinity ITV" (or similar), I've no idea whether the author actually read my post or not. It's not implausible that these content overlaps are coincidental — after all, I am a former Cambridge student and am thus fairly likely to notice similar things about the show as a current Cambridge student would.

However, what isn't on is the fact that the format of the post is clearly borrowed. I based my post on the Daily Intel blog's brilliant Gossip Girl Reality Index posts, which hilariously recap each episode of Gossip Girl while scoring the believability of its contents. 

Each GG Reality Index post is divided into two sections — the realistic and the surrealistic and/or unbelievable. The realistic section is given a header that summarises a representative realistic part of the episode (e.g. "Realer Than Lord Snooty's Obvious Crush on Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions" in my post) and the unrealistic section highlights a key fake bit (e.g. "Faker than the Warden Allowing DebaucheryFest (AKA the Feast of Fools) Provided that the Jesters "Volunteered" to Be Hazed All Year"). As I was clearly ripping off this format in my post, I made it clear where the idea came from and was careful to include links to the Daily Intel posts.

In a Guardian article criticising The Tab, Rowenna Davis writes, "I'm sure they know that if they spend their final year getting this tabloid off the ground, they'll walk into Rupert Murdoch's office and he'll be salivating to take them on, regardless of whether they've managed to achieve a degree while running the thing." Well, based on Ms Wu's piece, I'm sure this will be the case. After all, the tabloids are the worst culprits when it comes to failing to provide appropriate credits, attributions and sources for their content and, in online versions of stories, providing a link to these sources. 

By now, I'm certainly used to material I've written in a press release being "borrowed" or lazily rewritten (with the aid of a thesaurus to change some of the words) and given a new title, and used by an assortment of online news outlets. And if professional journalists are doing it, how can a bunch of students looking to boost their CVs be expected to do otherwise?

One Shop to Rule Them All

Of course, there are many, many shops I love in New York, but if I had to pick just one, it would have to be J. Crew. Maybe its clothes aren't the most exciting in the world but it has jeans that actually fit me perfectly and it has gorgeous summer dresses and pretty tops. 

I imagine I will probably empty the contents of four or five of its Manhattan branches within the space of about three days (although my bank account may be emptied before the shops themselves are). This time tomorrow, it's quite conceivable I will be in the J. Crew at Columbus Circle, being flattered by the incredibly camp sales assistant. The flight gets in 1t 11:15 local time, so I will probably be shopping by lunchtime, NYC time.

Honourable mention: Kate's Paperie. I do love my stationery and Kate's store practically brings me to a stationery-fuelled orgasm. Pretty cards, beautiful writing paper, great notebooks... It's just a shame that I didn't manage to achieve my goal of writing a proper letter for Letter Writing Month, which was last month. There is something special about a beautifully-penned belle lettre on fancy stationery. Maybe next year.

Time to go prep my NYC Moleskine.

The Divine Tragicomedy

I don't normally like new age music but the first time I heard Dante's Prayer by Loreena McKennitt, I couldn't resist, not least because I was studying Dante at the time in my Italian translation class. Also, the verse

Though we share this humble path, alone
How fragile is the heart
Oh give these clay feet wings to fly
To touch the face of the stars

struck a chord as my heart was feeling pretty fragile. 

I brought the song along to one of my Cambridge supervisions and the Prof and I spent a happy twenty minutes pulling out all of the Dante references of which there are many, from the opening, "When the dark wood fell before me /And all the paths were overgrown", mirroring closely Dante's opening lines, to references to "the mountain" (of Purgatory) and the "fountain of forgiveness" and so on. It's a pretty song regardless of the Dante references; one of the few of my favourite songs that doesn't involve a catchy guitar riff, upbeat pace and moany and/or shouty lyrics.

The Divine Comedy is so-called because of the tendency of the Greeks and Romans to divide poetry into two categories: comedies (of the "Low" style, on everyday subjects and with generally happy endings) and tragedies ("High"poems, which were about more serious matters (i.e. divinity). 

Perhaps this is slightly inaccurate because The DC actually transcends both styles, from the vulgar, graphic, comic descriptions of the punishments of the sinners in Hell, to the depictions of the divine, righteous love Dante the pilgrim finds in Paradise, and everything in between. You can pick pretty much any canto and it will crammed full of references, from classical literature to (then) contemporary figures. The same with events.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that a work of such great scope that references everything should be referenced so much in contemporary (and popular) culture. This Wikipedia page reminded me of a few I had forgotten and recommended some more to try to get my Dante fix, including:

1. Clerks. I love this film (as does, presumably, everyone who has worked in the service industry) whose structure is based (very loosely) around the circles of Dante's Inferno.

2. American Psycho. The book (which opens with the lines "abandon all hope..." as per the gates of Hell) is one of my favourites, and any film with Christian Bale can't go too far wrong. WoW references this quotation too.

3. Rachmaninoff's opera Francesca da Rimini based on the star-crossed lovers, Francesca and Paolo.

4. Thom Yorke apparently used Dante's work for inspiration in creating music (but then, anyone could say that really, given the breadth of the poem).

5. Se7en, another favourite film of mine is bursting at the seams with Dante in-jokes.

There's also a film of Inferno coming out this year, although I can't imagine it being any good. The whole point of The DC is the amazing language and the poem is so vast that capturing the essence in a two-hour film has to be bloody difficult. 

I am glad that the latest film version of one of the other 14th century Italian greats (Boccaccio's (hilarious) Decameron, from which Chaucer pinched most of his best ideas), starring Mischa Barton, of all people, keeps getting shelved. The film has also changed names so many times, from The Decameron: Angels & Virgins to Virgin Territory (via several others). It's bound to be truly awful, which is a shame as the book is outrageously funny and clever.

It strikes me that this blog is Dante-like in the scope of the content: I am too easily distracted by new, different things to write only about one subject but I hope that there is some cohesion. While I try to keep any divine argumentation out of it, there is definitely a mix of high and low here. Here and in most other blogs in the known universe... Whatever would Dante think?

E Quindi Uscimmo a Riveder le Stelle

I’ve only dabbled in Dante, in my “visions of Hell” Italian paper at university (Dante, Primo Levi, Italo Svevo… cheerful stuff), and even then, it was, of course, only Inferno and not Purgatorio or Paradiso. This suited me fine: Paradiso just waffled on about a golden river of light that symbolised the incredible, pure love Dante felt for his beloved Beatrice, and Purgatorio seemed like Hell-lite.

"It is the Confession, not the Priest that Gives us Absolution" — Atonement Review

It's been a bit of an Ian McEwan whirlwind for me these past few days. After reading a few good reviews and then seeing the trailer for Atonement, I decided that I had to see it as soon as possible but, as I am me, I had to read the book first. Fortunately, my landlord lent me a copy and I ploughed through it on Sunday night and Monday morning and it was well worth the effort.

I enjoyed Enduring Love, although it was a little too unsettling even for me, and enjoyed parts of Saturday but had always been put off by Atonement, which I assumed (from the cover) was a war story and my GCSE (1914-1939 and 1945-1973) and A-level (16th Century Europe) history syllabuses meant I never learned much about this period nor acquired much of an interest for it. To some extent, Atonement is a war story but that isn't really the point.

The film opens with its title being noisily tapped out on a typewriter. England, 1935. We see 13-year-old Briony Tallis putting the finishing touches to a play she has written to impress her older brother who is coming home to visit. 

Indeed, the film is oddly spread over time, the first half being taken up with the events of that day, the second half skipping nervously between various points in the future in stops and starts, back and forth. The sound of tapping keys creates a skittish tension that is echoed throughout the film in the typing, in the sound of nurses' heels on the floor, in the flickering lights of a train carriage and in the background music.

Watching from her bedroom window, Briony sees her 22-year-old sister Cecilia argue with the housekeeper's son Robbie and then strip off her clothes and dive into the fountain in their garden. Later, after intercepting a letter from Robbie to Cecilia, Briony catches them in the library putting the bookshelves to good use. Briony misinterprets the events she has seen, which leads her to tell a lie, the consequences of which reverberate throughout the rest of the film. In short [possible spoilers ahoy]:




Briony accuses Robbie of a crime he did not commit and he is imprisoned and before going to fight in France, where we see him, four years later, desperately trying to get back to Cecilia, now a nurse, whose letters are the only thing that keep him going.

It's easy for us to take sides and to blame Briony for what she has done. We see both sides of the story. Or, at least, we see 13-year-old Briony's side of the story and the side of the story of her older self as she finally comes to terms with what she did and what it meant. Her character's main role is really that of the narrator. We learn very little about Briony herself or, for that matter, about Robbie and Cecilia other than that they love each other very much, despite the stolen moments they spent together being so brief. 

This is Briony's story, however, and she as the author/narrator gets to choose the ending and if she feels that the real, true ending wasn't the best ending for the novel we later learn she is writing, it is within her power to rewrite history, bringing us to question what is reality, what is truth, what is honesty, guilt, punishment, penance and, of course, atonement. If we hold Briony responsible, it is because she wants us to do so.

Briony must live with what she has done and it is her hope that in finally being able to write down what really happened — to confess her sins - she will finally receive the absolution she seeks. Images of water are repeated throughout the film: the fountain into which Cecilia dives. The river where Robbie "saves" a misguided ten-year-old Briony. The ocean Robbie is searching for when he is in France on his way back to Dunquerque and to Cecilia. The hydration he is desperately seeking after many days of delusional walking. The cottage by the sea to which he and Cecilia will escape once he arrives in England. The view of the Thames from the hospital Briony works in. And, towards the end, the violent rush of water through London that changes everything once more. 

We see Briony cleaning everything in her hospital with meticulous care, especially her hands, which she scrubs and scrubs but to no avail. Her sins cannot be washed away so easily.

We don't get to see whether or not she was finally able to find peace and to forgive herself, although the film ends in the present day when Briony is an old and much-acclaimed writer. The ending works well, I think; as in the book, there is more than one ending and as for which is the real, right ending, we cannot tell. As Cecilia tells her sister, Briony is an unreliable witness. There are many wider implications for this but on a more personal level, I've always been a big fan of the role of the unreliable narrator.

As for the film itself, Saoirse Ronan (13-year-old Briony) and James McAvoy (Robbie) both put in good performances. Keira Knightley did fine too, although she didn't have too much to do other than a) look bored, b) look sad and c) sound posh (her accent was perhaps a fraction too glass-cutting and I feel in a good position to judge) and she did look stunning in her green ballgown, though less so in her nurse's uniform. Beautiful, haunting score music from Dario Marianelli was perfectly done. All in all, a thoroughly good show.

Moleskine NYC

As a massive fan of stationery in general and Moleskine in particular, you can imagine my delight when I discovered last autumn that the company had just brought out a range of Moleskine City Notebook — the guidebooks you write yourself. 

These are absolutely perfect for someone like me who loves to write travel diaries and to make notes of shops, restaurants and places to be revisited and who ends up buying a new guidebook every time she goes back to a city. The City Notebooks all have maps, notebook pages, removable sheets, tabbed pages and all sorts of other wonders. According to the Moleskine website, they are:

A special guidebook, ideal for those who travel, whether to see the sights or for work, as a way of a organising your trip and to preserve it for your memory and your records. Perfect for those who live there, as a way of organizing the things they know and need about the city they live in. Each notebook has an elastic closure, 228 pages, with up to 44 pages in colours and have a sewn binding. There is an inside accordion pocket and three ribbon placemarkers, each in a different colour.

You can, for example, use the included tracing paper to mark out cool walking routes you have taken. You can choose which categories to include in the tabbed sections (shopping, bars, museums, parks, etc.). And most importantly, you can add to it each time you go back without having to start a completely new holiday diary. This is something you can keep in your bag at all times and make a note of anything worth going back to.

Unfortunately, last year they only had European city ones and although I do like Paris a lot, I don't go there very often anymore. Deprived of the New York Notebook, I bought Paris anyway and of course, have not yet bothered to fill it in. However, yesterday, in an event worthy of being entered into my Google Cal, the Moleskine New York was released; admittedly, not to any of the bookshops out here in the Sticks but I intend to have a look the slightly more metropolitan Oxford at the weekend and if I still have no luck, I shall either go for Amazon or a London trip.

Now all Moleskine needs is to have electronic notebooks (oh, the irony!) and then they can have some nice Web 2.0 tagging and categorisation... Maybe next year, eh?