A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer
December 26, 2024 at 04:30PMBefore his death in 2019, Kevin Killian published more than one million words across nearly 2,400 Amazon reviews—a collection of writing that transcends its humdrum genre. “I have often used Amazon reviews as a springboard to doing other kinds of writing projects,” Killian, an author of numerous novels and poetry collections, once told an interviewer. “I get a lot of my kinks out there.” Oscar Schwartz traces those kinks through a collection of reviews—baby food, smelling salts, Meet the Fockers—to reveal how Killian made one of the world’s best-known corporate behemoths a publisher of experimental literature.
It’s tempting to interpret Killian’s Amazonian doppelgänger as an ironic burlesque of the online shopper. In the mid-two-thousands, when Killian was at his most prolific as a reviewer, it was becoming clear that Amazon was contributing to the destruction of the type of creative life that he enjoyed. Was this his way of queering e-commerce, subverting the platform from within?
Killian, like so many of us on social media, seemed to love his platform of choice—the Amazon review section—despite its complicity in a techno-capitalist system that he abhorred. A similar ambiguity recurs throughout his stories and plays. As the writer Lonely Christopher observes, Killian’s early work is “replete with transactional sex with older men, but he always seemed to cherish what he got out of it, even if it was only the experience of being in or out of control.” The same is true with the Amazon project. The whole thing turns on the question of who is really using whom: the reviewer or the platform?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/26/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-an-amazon-reviewer/
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