And for your daily morning outrage...

Today we have for you the finely-tuned rhetoric of Tony Long, the copy chief at Wired, and his editorial on mp3s and comics. The mp3 part is, well, forgettable, but the comic part is where he really gets going. He's referring to Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese, which has been nominated for an National Book Award in the young people's literature category:

I have not read this particular "novel" but I'm familiar with the genre so I'm going to go out on a limb here. First, I'll bet for what it is, it's pretty good. Probably damned good. But it's a comic book. And comic books should not be nominated for National Book Awards, in any category. That should be reserved for books that are, well, all words.

[...]

This is simply to say that, as literature, the comic book does not deserve equal status with real novels, or short stories. It's apples and oranges.

If you've ever tried writing a real novel, you'll know where I'm coming from. To do it, and especially to do it well enough to be nominated for this award, the American equivalent of France's Prix Goncourt or Britain's Booker Prize, is exceedingly difficult.

I'd rather like to see him (a) actually read the thing before deciding that it can't possibly be as good as a real novel, and (b) try to write one himself before assuming that writing one is harder. There's a lot of crap comics out there. There's a lot of crap novels out there. Excellence is excellence, no matter what format it's in.

I had absolutely no desire to read American Born Chinese before reading this, admittedly because I'd only vaguely ehard about it in passing and had no idea what it was about, but I've just added it to my Amazon wish list to remind myself to buy it when I get back.

Off to ...

...pack. And sometime after that to leave.

I just spent an hour loading about four gigs' worth of audiobooks onto my iPod. I have a three hour drive in front of me today OH GOD DO I HAVE ENOUGH ENTERTAINMENT?

(Well, yeah, the iPod's coming on the ship with me, although I plan to spend the time reading paper books instead of audiobooks, because I can listen to audiobooks in the car and while doing art so I've been "reading" a lot more books that way this past couple of years than I have paper books. But audiobooks are absolutely necessary for long-distance driving.)