SocioBlog - the Book?

March 30, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stuff White People Like opened shop on January 18th of this year. On March 20th, it had a book contract for a reported $300,000.

The story in today’s Times uses words like “shock” and “outcry” (why not “awe”?) to describe the reaction in the publication biz and perhaps in blogland. One book person quoted notes, correctly, that Martin Mull did this decades ago with “The History of White People in America.”

But that’s like complaining that someone has already written a book about French cooking or a biography of Lincoln. The accusation of non-originality is a thin veneer and doesn’t do much to hide the underlying envy. (No envy here at the SocioBlog, of course. Those 19.3 million hits, and counting, at Stuff White are meaningless ephemera.)

Now we can add blogosphere to the non-literary worlds – movies, TV, sports, politics – that have long provided paths to the best seller lists. On the Times non-fiction list today, a third of the titles are by “writers” who are, as they say at the Oscars, adapted from another medium – wordsmiths like Newt Gingrich and Nikki Sixx. At the top of the list is that literary lioness Valerie Bertinelli, whose Losing It “focuses on depression and her effort to lose weight.” The publisher is Free Press, a familiar trademark for sociologists. Nice to know that Valerie is hanging out in the editorial offices with Talcott Parsons and the Becker boys (Ernest and Howard), among others.

Celebrity seems to have become a kind of universal currency. If you have enough of it, you can circulate among elites and move from the high level of one world to a high level in another. Celebrity politicians become best-selling authors; celebrity body-builders become actors and then governors; celebrity real estate developers become TV stars; celebrity call girls become million-download singers. And now celebrity bloggers.

But where are the celebrity sociologists?