Today Charlie Haas, author of The Enthusiast, is guest blogging for us. Here's what he wrote:
"I grew up in a town where a bookish family stuck out like a page-turning thumb. My dad made things worse: he became president of the public library board, and fought the local establishment for money to keep our one-branch library going. My sister worked there through high school and into college. My brother and I hung out there and campaigned for permission slips that would let us take out books that were too “mature” for us.
The head librarian was a world-weary guy with hair flopping over his eyes and a cigarette permanently dangling from his mouth (yes, in the library — I go back a ways). He issued me an adult-book permission slip, but also warned me, as he squinted through his smokescreen, that it was possible for a person to be too smart. It would be a long time before I had any idea what he was talking about.
In the meantime, that permission slip, which enabled my education by ‘50s and ‘60s hipster novels, was my treasured equivalent of a Roger Maris rookie card. Over a few years of heavy use it developed a nice suede-like nap, like a page in one of the library’s more popular titles — something by Pearl S. Buck or Robert A. Heinlein.
These days I live in Oakland, California, another town where the library has to fight for funding – maybe that’s true of most towns. In Oakland it seems particularly crucial, because shortened hours are affecting branches that serve as de facto daycare and senior centers, homework tutoring sites, Internet access points, teen refuges, movie theaters and job-hunting facilities, as well as places to take out books.
Some days I put my work in a backpack and wander around town, stopping in parks and coffeehouses and always at least one library branch, to get the indispensable feeling that what I’m writing might join the world of cloudy plastic dustcovers and time-spanning date stamps. These days I have to hope that a branch I wander to won’t be closed for the day by cutbacks. A system as well-used as ours should be open all the time.
My library card is modern plastic, but my Friends of the Library credential is paper. It lives in my wallet, and by the end of the membership year it has little of that Roger Maris suede thing going on.
My sister is still in the business, working on the Dewey editing program for the Online Computer Library Center. Recently, my wife and I joined her for dinner with two of the Dewey system’s U.S. editors. Talk about star-struck — I’ve met movie stars, but this was in a whole other league. We asked questions all evening — Does a new sub-genre of hip-hop get its own number? Is the decision art or science? (Both.) Rarely have I paid so little attention to good food.
My novel, The Enthusiast, is about a guy who works for enthusiast magazines, one after another, from Spelunk to Crochet Life, from Ice Climbing to Cozy, the Magazine of Tea. He sees the small intense worlds that don’t see one another, and imagines America as “a huge room lined with doors. Behind each door was an enthusiasm… Most people went through only a few of those doors in their lives, but I crashed one wild party after another and came back for more.”
Those rooms full of enthusiasm are escape hatches from the rest of life, from commercial necessity and daily compromise. Their attractions wary wildly, from crazed sport to gentle craft, but they all have something in common: people are happy to be in there, exercising a passion, finding others who share it, and filling their urgent immaterial needs. They’d stay forever if they could.
I think I know some places like that."