By now the story of what happened when I read A.S. Byatt's Possession for the first time is practically legend in my own life. It was my senior year of high school and I was going to be a marine biologist, except I was doing terribly in my science classes, especially biology. Byatt's novel reminded me that I loved books, that I loved analyzing books. It showed me that it was OK to want to spend the rest of my life immersed in books and, further, that research can be downright sexy. I still reread the first ten pages with a building excitement I normally associate with sexual attraction, and my heart pounds at the moment when Roland first touches Ash's hidden letters. Neil LaBute's film of Possession retains some of that literary rush, and, even though huge sections of the book are cut out, he was remarkably faithful to the heart of the story. I was prepared for the changes made to the characters, so even Roland as an American didn't alarm me. What completely caught me off guard was how affecting I found LaBute's portrayal of Possession's relationships, both the cautious modern romance of Roland and Maud and the fiery Victorian passion between Ash and Christabel. I'm beginning to see now that Byatt's book also captures something of what I feel about love, something that has been buried deep during the past year, and this rather prosaic movie brought it back to me in a way that knocked the wind out of me. It's so important to me to be aloof and cold, the third woman of Christabel's fairy tale who is neither golden nor silver but cloaked in mystery, but I also crave the all-consuming fire of love.

I could also be the princess lying in the center of the labyrinth, waiting to be found. I used to be obsessed with labyrinths and mazes, making photocopies of ones I found in books and tracing my way out of them over and over again. I think of the story of the labyrinth that held the Minotaur and Ariadne's thread that guided Jason out again, Jennifer Connelly making her way though the maze in Labyrinth while a very sexual David Bowie attempts to stop her, Yoko Ono's transparent maze that I walked through with my hands stretched out in front of me to avoid slamming into a wall I couldn't see. Labyrinths were important to Borges too, though the small exhibit I saw at the San Francisco Main Library this weekend didn't really tell me why, just gave me some suggestions. He saw the world as a library, as a labyrinth. For Borges an infinite object can be simultaneously a book and a labyrinth. I feel lost trying to think about it, even though I feel like there is meaning there for me. I need to read The Garden of Forking Paths. Fortunately for me, Dan just loaned me a copy of Borges's complete fictions.

My movie rental for the week was Never Cry Wolf, a film that I saw as a child and wanted to see again. It was just as funny and touching as I remember it. A researcher sent by the government to study Alaskan wolves and to show that they must be eradicated instead falls in with some local Inuit and nearly becomes part of a wolf pack himself. However, we should know better than to think it is possible to maintain such an idyll, even for a short time.

I also saw Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three at the PFA this weekend as part of a small farewell tribute to the director. This was Cold War politics reduced to its ludicrous essentials, with James Cagney as a Coca Cola executive who sees Communist Russia only as a vast untapped market and who gets ticked off at East Berliners for not returning their empty Coke bottles. Filmed in 1961 on location in Berlin at the exact moment the Berlin Wall went up, One, Two, Three is scathingly funny and uncomfortably accurate in its satire.

Possession
San Francisco Public Library