Twin Oaks For Library Time Out

Nobody knows that there is a Twin Oaks Branch library in Austin. That's why it's special. It's built for the surprise feeling you get when you're wandering around behind the buildings in an old and crumbly shopping center while you're waiting for your girlfriend to get her eyebrows done and you look up and realize that they've hidden a library there.

Except not exactly. When Twin Oaks was built in 1956, it was the first "shopping mall" library in Austin. These are libraries built with the intention of integrating with the routine of the community. The term is more accessible to the community, but the idea is to put a library in the way of people's shopping habits and needs, and hope that they bump into literacy, civic involvement, education and the wonderful humanitarian service that a library provides to its community here in this 21st century. At convenience, or at least with greater frequency.

They're also cheaper to set up, since they usually occupy empty commercial buildings, and quicker to open too, in the range of months, rather than years.

And it works. At least from what I observed. There were open computers, parking, desks, and books.

Walking through a new library doesn't inspire in me quite the feeling of Disney princess-hood that I am imagining right now so much as it does a feeling of suction, or a digging, or a gnawing at me to walk through the entirety of the stacks as quickly as possible as slowly as I can bear to figure out the layout, to spot as many familiar titles as I can, and make my way from front to back, around computers and pamphlets, calendars and the folks who look at home crumpled and weary at 5pm on a week day in front of laptops, up to the librarian's desks and past the art on the walls, and finally back into the stacks where I am seized by impatience, anxiety, and distraction all at once, whereupon I fall on some section of books, clawing them out onto a table I make with my knees. And I read, right there with one leg stretched out behind me, like I am actually going to make up my mind and take one to an actual table to read.

Where I fell today was the children's section. I was victimized by a bookend that promised all of the illustrated gore of ancient Greek warfare. Before I knew it, I was reading about Mr. Roger's special friends, and as I put that book back on the shelf, my hand swept across this tome.

Trembling, I flipped open the book to a page near the middle. I was greeted with this smiling face.

The caption reads, One of the many celebrities whose lives were cut short by drug abuse is John Belushi, who rose to fame as one of the early members of Saturday Night Live. Shameful though it was, I laughed uncontrollably, and justified the awkward feeling that had come over me when I first crouched down in the children's section.

Maybe it's time for me to defend John's legacy and make a case against bad books.