Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer
Should you have been a brand new father or mother in 2006, you might need stumbled throughout a prolonged Amazon evaluate of Gerber’s Tender Harvest Candy Potato Child Meals entitled “Mmm-Mmm Good.” The evaluate, which provides the product 5 stars, begins with an outline of the puréed foodstuff (a “tantalizing mix of natural goodness” with a “gentle, piquant taste to the basis greens”). It then veers into a short vignette in regards to the reviewer flinging meals throughout the kitchen when he was a “wee laddie,” adopted by a peculiar apart about “feeding an toddler a tiny quantity of dust daily” as per “Native” observe. The three-hundred-and-twenty-five-word writeup concludes with a picture of the reviewer’s “inside child” gnawing on the label of the Gerber’s jar, seemingly leaving any potential buyer with extra questions than once they began. Is there actually dust within the child meals? Does the reviewer purchase this product for himself? And what sort of Amazon consumer compares the style of mashed greens to a “twenties Irving Berlin normal”?
The account behind the evaluate belonged to the avant-garde San Francisco author Kevin Killian, who printed over 1,000,000 phrases on Amazon, throughout virtually twenty-four hundred evaluations, earlier than his dying, in 2019. The merchandise he evaluated included DVDs of basic twentieth-century cinema, literary biographies, and experimental poetry collections—but in addition toiletries, Halloween costumes, and a chestnut tree. His evaluations, normally 5 stars, are sometimes exaggeratedly gushing, even melodramatic, however they aren’t mere parodies. Killian brings critical consideration to bear on the whole lot he evaluations, and lots of of his suggestions are genuinely illuminating. (“They harvest the sap out of Norwegian, Swiss, and West German moss crops, to get that honey-colored sweetness into each drop of the conditioning detangler,” he writes of a now discontinued Aveda hair conditioner.) At his peak, Killian was writing a number of evaluations a day, and was at one time ranked sixty-first on the Site’s now discontinued High Hundred reviewer checklist.
“Chosen Amazon Evaluations,” an expansive assortment of Killian’s works on the location, scraped from Amazon’s servers, evenly edited, and organized chronologically, proposes a synthesis of two Kevins—the novel littérateur and the conscientious shopper. With a blue cowl and a easy tricolor stripe operating beneath the writer’s identify, rendered in a sublime script, the e-book remembers the Library of America assortment. In a black-and-white {photograph} on the high right-hand nook, Killian stares on the digicam with wry eyes and a cocky grin, as if to allow us to in on a joke.
Killian grew up in Smithtown, N.Y., a largely white, middle-class suburb tucked away in a pocket of Lengthy Island’s North Shore. In his collected memoirs, “Fascination,” he writes about hitchhiking into town as a teen-ager to sleep with older males. Later, he bumped across the queer scene in New York Metropolis, performing in pornographic films, hanging out with Allen Ginsberg, briefly relationship Arthur Russell.
In 1980, Killian moved to San Francisco and commenced attending weekly writing workshops run by the poet Robert Glück, on the Small Press Site visitors Bookstore. He had been making an attempt to put in writing novels since he was a teen-ager, however to this point had by no means been printed—“so busy was I with alcohol, medication, and indiscriminate intercourse, pleasure,” as he put it. Within the workshops, he discovered his voice. The courses have been free, however rigorous and intensive. Writers within the motion, which got here to be generally known as New Narrative, have been inspired to work between genres, to experiment with literary type, to make use of a confessional register, and to have interaction intellectually with vital concept. Killian earned a status for being humorous and outré. Glück mirrored that, for his former scholar, “pleasure and security have been opposites, and his work turned on the second when our hero sees the broader perspective of somebody who desires to break him.”
It was additionally by way of the workshops that Killian, who was queer, met and fell in love with Dodie Bellamy, a queer novelist concerned within the metropolis’s feminist scene. Their union shocked many, however their relationship was, in a manner, an expression of the New Narrative lifestyle: they have been confounding all classes of style and sexuality, even the queer ones. They married in 1985. Killian labored in administration at a janitorial agency, and so they moved into an residence collectively. The steadiness that adopted allowed them time to deal with writing. Killian was being printed. His poems have been chosen by John Ashbery to be anthologized within the 1988 quantity of Greatest American Poetry. His first novel, “Shy,” got here out a 12 months later. He additionally wrote artwork criticism and quick tales, and dozens of performs for the San Francisco Poets Theater.
This productive interval was interrupted when, in 2003, Killian had a coronary heart assault. His treatment routine destroyed his will to put in writing. Initially, he was resigned to being an “ex-writer,” however because the medication tapered off the urge to compose returned. Bellamy recommended that temporary Amazon evaluations may present a delicate reëntry. Killian started tentatively, punching single phrases into the location’s evaluate type. Inside a few years, he was producing elaborate, protracted critiques, typically a number of instances a day.
In Amazon’s first annual report, printed in 1997, the customer-review part was outlined as a characteristic that might encourage customers “to return regularly to the location” and “promote loyalty and repeat purchases.” By the mid-two-thousands, as Killian was getting began, the evaluate part had turn into a central characteristic of Amazon’s “on-line group,” broadly related to the democratic promise of Net 2.0. It was right here that a median shopper might turn into a revered, clear-eyed critic and “present their fellow consumers with useful, sincere, tell-it-like-it-is product data,” based on the Site.
In his early writeups, Killian adopts, or maybe apes, a tone of giddy consumerism. He loved “The Grudge.” He’s lukewarm about “Meet the Fockers.” He’s delighted in regards to the “tangy winter pears,” the “relish and mustard,” and the “cunningly wrapped sausages” that are available in a Picnic-Themed Present Basket (5 stars). The evaluations quickly turn into extra experimental, pushing the user-generated evaluate format past its utilitarian operate.
Think about, for example, his evaluate of MacKenzies Smelling Salts, from December 31, 2013. “My Irish grandfather used to maintain a bottle of MacKenzies smelling salts subsequent to his desk,” Killian begins. “He was the principal at Bushwick Excessive College (in Brooklyn, NY) within the Thirties and Forties, earlier than it turned a harmful place to stay in, and manner earlier than Bushwick regained its present state of fascinating space for brand new gentrification. . . . At college, he would press the saturated cotton beneath the nostrils of poor ladies who realized they have been pregnant in well being class, earlier than he expelled them. Or when the coverage of corporal punishment had allowed him slightly an excessive amount of paddling of the sophomore boys, he would apply smelling salts to their faces until they recovered from passing out.”
Killian then describes how, as a teen, he started sneaking sniffs of MacKenzies whereas raiding his grandparents’ medication cupboard, as a thrill, however now, as a grown man, makes use of them to get better from grief or after a shock. When he was handed over for inclusion within the 2014 Whitney Biennial “by a troika of careless curators,” for instance, Bellamy handed the MacKenzies beneath his nostril “as if she have been my grandfather ministering to these pregnant ladies of yore.” Killian took one snort and was revived—“nonetheless grieving for my disappointment however not less than capable of operate and return to creating my artwork, feeding the cats, and so forth., being a person.” All in all, a five-star product.
“Whenever you learn them, yeah, they’re evaluations of a form,” Killian mentioned of his evaluations. “However in addition they appear to be novels. They’re poems. They’re essays about life.” At some point, he’s writing about Liz Kotz’s art-historical quantity on the “flip towards language” in visible artwork within the nineteen-sixties. Then he’s doing a detailed studying of Kristen Stewart’s hair in “Twilight.” Then a tape of “Viniyoga Remedy for the Low Again, Sacrum and Hips.” (“I wished to get viniyoga tape ever for the reason that early ’70s when, as a boy, I suffered a lower-back damage in France, once I was pushed out of a slowly shifting bus by some schoolmates.”)
Such a frenetic montaging of topics and types was a signature of New Narrative writing. Chris Kraus’s “I Love Dick,” for example, moved registers between memoir, fiction, and concept. Bellamy’s “The Letters of Mina Harker” was a pastiche epistolary novel written from the angle of the primary feminine character in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” On Amazon, Killian stretched this blurring of boundaries to its restrict. For him, virtually something on the market on the “the whole lot retailer” got here laden with cultural significance. A evaluate of Advil, for instance, begins with a glib joke about how scrumptious the capsule’s cherry taste is. If warnings didn’t preclude it, Killian “can be popping Advils all day simply to get that scrumptious style in my mouth, like a child in a sweet retailer.” However then he goes on to clarify that he began taking the medication after an industrial accident at work, when a field of paper inventory tumbled onto his foot. The offhand evaluate turns into an indirect but insightful commentary about trendy life: it sucks that your foot was crushed at work, however isn’t it good having a cherry-flavored painkiller delivered to your door whilst you recuperate?
Such forays into autobiography are widespread all through “Chosen Amazon Evaluations.” Killian posts all of his evaluations beneath his actual identify, and his expertise holds the disparate entries collectively. Typically, an merchandise will set off a Proustian reverie. A bracelet attraction of a smiling monkey, for example, reminds Killian of a few treasured childhood amulets that he believed would shield him “from the evil spirits identified to hang-out my childhood residence in Smithtown (Lengthy Island)—however I used to be too bashful to put on them on a bracelet, fearing taunts from bullies, fearing being thought of a ‘sissy.’ ”
The memoiristic impulse is central to Killian’s œuvre. A lot of his writing particulars his formative years in transgressive element. As soon as, after a studying of the autobiographical vignette “Spurt,” wherein Killian leaves a person who has a fetish for blood play bleeding out within the bathe, an aggrieved girl within the viewers approached him. “Did that actually occur to you?” she requested. Kevin responded, “I do know. I’m so ashamed and embarrassed about that.” She slapped him within the face.
Holding a New Narrative author liable for the habits of a personality of their work is doubtful, although. Such authors are all the time, of their work, deconstructing secure concepts of the self. For Killian, “Kevin Killian” capabilities as a versatile motif, showing typically within the first individual, typically within the third, typically in disguise. In a single story, Kevin Killian is a ghost haunting an property in Smithtown. In one other, Kevin Killian is a curmudgeonly outdated man dwelling in rural New York with a pet chimpanzee named Chester who writes the novels attributed to Kevin Killian.
In “Chosen Amazon Evaluations,” Killian provides yet one more Kevin to the checklist. This Kevin spends his evenings along with his spouse curled up on the sofa with their two cats, Ted and Sylvia, watching Katharine Hepburn films, or knitting, adorning truffles, and hanging pet-themed ornaments on the Christmas bushes, as in his five-star 2007 evaluate of Pet Pawprint Hanging DIY Souvenir Decoration.
However Kevin Killian within the evaluate part was not the true Kevin Killian, not less than not precisely. Did Killian have kids, as he claimed in a number of evaluations? No. Did he take pleasure in high quality meals? No. (In line with buddies, he lived on a weight loss program of solely microwave meals and Tab.) Did he really need to examine airport administration? In all probability not. Did that twelve-color set of ballpoint pens actually set off a reminiscence of attending college as an American boy in rural France, the place his classmates had “stunning pens that have been virtually household heirlooms?” No. The true Kevin Killian had by no means even visited France. He most likely didn’t personal that twelve-color set of pens, both. On Amazon, you’ll be able to evaluate a product with out shopping for it.
It’s tempting to interpret Killian’s Amazonian doppelgänger as an ironic burlesque of the net shopper. Within the mid-two-thousands, when Killian was at his most prolific as a reviewer, it was turning into clear that Amazon was contributing to the destruction of the kind of artistic life that he loved. Was this his manner of queering e-commerce, subverting the platform from inside? Wayne Koestenbaum argues, in his foreword to the gathering, that Killian’s evaluations “Occupy Amazon” with “a radical-faerie insouciance. . . . He enacts a cosmophagic vital observe, doing a Sontag however with out the severity.”
However “Chosen Amazon Evaluations” isn’t just a conceptual artwork work, or a literary hoax. Killian’s evaluations are brimming with real pleasure, and in addition a wonderment and ardor for the good number of stuff on the Site. His reviewing voice typically resembles Frank O’Hara’s revelry within the unusual within the poem “At this time.” (“Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You actually are stunning!”)
