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Introduced into the Illinois House January 23 by Representative Anne Stava-Murray and cosponsored by Representative Diane Blair-Sherlock, HB 4567 aims to protect library workers throughout the state from harassment, threats, and disorderly conduct. The bill comes in the new legislative session after the state passed the nation’s first anti-book ban bill last year and dealt with several bomb threats in the months following that bill’s passage. The new bill would amend the Criminal Code of 2012.

The bill summary reads as follows:

 Includes in offense of threatening a public official or human service provider, threatening a library employee. Provides that the threat to a public official, human service provider, or library employee includes a threat made electronically or via social media. Defines “library employee”. In the offense of threatening a public official, human service provider, or library employee, includes in the definition of “public official” an employee of any State of Illinois constitutional office, State agency, or the General Assembly. Provides that the offense of disorderly conduct includes transmitting or causing to be transmitted threats or false reports electronically or via social media. Provides that disorderly conduct includes the knowing transmission of or causing to be transmitted in any manner, including electronically or via social media, a lewd, lascivious, indecent, or obscene message to a public official. Provides that making a terrorist threat or falsely making a terrorist threat includes making a terrorist threat or falsely making a terrorist threat by any means of communication, including electronically or via social media. Makes other changes.

Where once library workers were not explicitly named among populations protected from threats, the new bill would include the profession by name. The threats would be investigated and taken seriously, whether they came in person or through electronic means, including social media.

Not only does naming library workers in the Criminal Code lend legitimacy to the profession–and it covers everyone within a library from professional librarians to shelvers, custodians, and others–it codifies the importance of libraries to democracy in the state. Protections would extend beyond public library workers, too. It also covers those working for private libraries.

1.

This past fall, Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In December, I attended a traditional Norwegian brunch and live stream of Fosse’s Nobel lecture at the Norwegian consul general’s residence in New York City.

At the time, I’d only read Melancholy, Fosse’s 1995 novel about a grandiose and possibly ephebophilic painter who ends up in the asylum. I had no idea, at the time, how intensely Septology, his recent seven-volume epic, set over the seven days leading up to Christmas—the same seven days, in the liturgical calendar, as it so happened, that I’d end up reading it—would hit me. That it would serve as a guidebook, a religious text, a light over the darkest week of the year.

Septology follows Asle, an aging painter and widower living in Dylgja, on Norway’s western coast, as he prepares for his annual Christmas exhibit in the nearby town Bjørgvin. He lives alone, doesn’t drink or smoke, and is a practicing Catholic. His social circle is limited to Åsleik, his neighbor and friend; Beyer, the gallerist who shows his paintings; and Ales, his long-deceased wife, with whom he still speaks every day. Each volume starts with Asle contemplating a painting he’s just painted, a blank canvas with two strokes forming a cross; each volume ends with Asle praying the rosary.

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January 5 – February 3, 2024

My first brush with Derpycon lore—and by lore I mean its legally enforced code of conduct—was a scroll through its extensive weapons policy.

“LIVE STEEL,” the website went, “is defined as bayonets, shuriken, star knives, metal armor—including chain mail.” Studs on clothing constituted a fringe case, subject to approval by convention staff. This precaution was not due to fear of terrorist attacks but to the preponderance of weapon-wielding anime characters, a popular costume choice among attendees. The rules, I imagined, had been set in response to years of disastrous horseplay, yaoi paddle hazing rituals, and airsoft-gun-as-ray-gun mishaps. Thankfully everyone on the registration line ahead of me had gotten the memo, and their cardboard scythes buckled innocuously.

Derpycon was billed as a three-day, all-ages, “multi-genre” anime, gaming, sci-fi, and comics convention for nerds of all stripes. It boasted “panels, concerts, video gaming, cosplay, vendors, dances, LARPs, artists, and so much more.” The branding this year aligned the convention with the conventional definition of derpyness, meme-speak for bumbling or awkwardness, rather than the more controversial Derpy, a cross-eyed background character from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Any catering to the controversial “brony” (adult male fans of My Little Pony) set would have surprised me. Instead, images proliferated of mishaps: someone running late for the train with a slice of toast in their mouth and “under construction” imagery (the convention’s mascot is the Derpycone). The provisional or half-baked aspects of the con would therefore feel on-brand. The press pass I received contained a charming illustration of a blushing man struggling to stop a train with a large wooden beam in his arms.

While Derpycon serves many fans, its clear focus is the otaku, or zealous consumers of Japanese popular media. I’d count myself among them, although my own relationship with J-pop became complicated during art school. Like most young illustrators—likely including more than a few teens here in attendance—I first learned to draw in an anime-influenced style that my professors, considering it juvenile, forbade. I adopted it both to spite them and hedge my bets commercially, with mixed success. Now some illustration clients request the anime/manga aesthetic while para-academic institutions still shun it, and AI does it exponentially better than I ever could.

When these conventions started, much of Japanese animation could only reach the U.S. via a niche VHS pipeline, but today the look is arguably the most popular figurative aesthetic worldwide. The casual fanbase is much larger, and the convergence with fine art and high fashion is pervasive, yet the otaku world retains some vestige of insularity and self-consciousness. (Hence the pejorative weeaboo or weeb for its more dedicated constituents—the kinds of hardcore fans lining up sheepishly beside me for weapons inspection.)

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