What's the deal? Your weekly Publisher's Lunch deal snark (Blogiana Edition)

Publisher's Lunch says: Comedic writer and former radio host April Winchell's REGRETSY, based on the popular blog of the same name; featuring a collection of the oddest, most humorous, and most disturbing crafts the world has ever seen, along with commentary provided by the author, to Jill Schwartzman at Villard, for trade paperback publication, in a pre-empt, by Meg Thompson at LJK Literary Management (world English).

Indichik says: So yeah, speaking of regret? Books based on blogs. Whatever happened to that one based on Stuff White People Like? I think I saw it in the 75% off bin at Urban Outfitters, like six months ago? There's a reason online media is taking of while print is (arguably) dying: disposability. Blogs are, quite rightly, written to be transient. When you spend good money to try to convert that concept to glossy covers and acid-free paper you lose what makes them work. Not everything is meant to be printed. Let's let blogs be blogs, okay? An end in themselves. (Confidential to book agents: contact me for my 78-page proposal for Indichik: The Novel.)

Stuff White People Don't Like: Supercilious, Faux-Racially Insightful Humor Blogs

Stuff White People Like: White people like creative writing, ha ha! Vintage clothing, ho ho! Girls with bangs, he he! Yuk yuk, it's funny because we're so lame! The blog is ostensibly written as if it's addressing people of color as some kind of "field guide to whitey," but personally, I'm not aware that any of my friends of color have ever read it. Nor am I aware of any ofThen again, people of color don't have any strong affinity for Jeff Foxworthy or Pluggers, either, nor do their elite hip urban literati friends. SWPL is no different from these, it's just that instead of defining "white" in terms of this:

It's now defined as this:

In fact, this site's sole raison d'etre is so that a certain type of white person who's never identified with their trailer-dwelling brethren over yonder, the target of traditional "cracker" humor, can allay their guilt by pretending to understand what people of color think is ridiculous about them. The fact of whether it's operated by a white person or a person of color is more or less irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned, since it's clearly written by someone who comes from the very same culture he or she is lampooning. Which is exactly why I find it so disingenous, because, at it's core, this isn't "stuff white people like": it's stuff hip educated urbanites of any color like. Quite simply, this is class conflict, and yet it's being wrongly framed as a racial one. Yo homies, SWPL has taken race-baiting to a whole new level.