Since January, Christian Lander has been skewering a certain subsection of the population in his wildly popular blog, “Stuff White People Like.”  A few days ago, he posted Stuff White People Like #108, “Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music,” which naturally enough got my attention. He essentially writes that white people to go classical music concerts to impress others rather than to actually listen to the music.

If you’re like me and you work in the arts field specifically to hear Handel arias and Bach cantatas and five-hour operas like Les Troyens and Die Meistersinger as often as possible, the column is a big ouch—and also devastatingly funny. (One of my favorites lines is Lander’s description of symphony concerts where “white couples have paid upwards of $80 for the right to dress up and sit in a chair for hour reading every word in the program.” Yeah, we’ve all seen this countless times, and it’s one of my pet peeves.)

For Lander, 2008 has provided at least 15 minutes of fame. He wrote his first blog entry on January 18 (#1, Coffee), following up with things like non-profit organizations (#12), microbreweries (#23), the Sunday New York Times (#46), arts degrees (#47), and threatening to move to Canada (#75). Soon the site was logging millions of visitors, and he quickly got a Random House book deal, with Stuff White People Like in bookstores on July 1. read more