Into the Omazone

At the San Francisco Apple store, I surveyed the iPods for a couple of minutes and said to the salesgirl, “I’ll take a 4 gig Nano in . . .” I zoomed my eyes over the tableful of candy-colored slabs, and declared, “Green.” When I got home I looked my Nano up on Amazon and discovered I could have gotten it for ten dollars cheaper, free shipping, no taxes. How could I have been so foolhardy? The trendy bespectacled girl did show me how to use the thing, but she would have done that whether I bought it or not. I started digging deeper into Amazon’s iPod pages, and I learned that my Nano needs an extended warranty, a skin, better ear buds, a case, a voice mike, a charger, external speakers, a lanyard, a wristband in case some day I should go jogging. My Nano needs so many things, and each thing comes in so many brands, each with its plusses and minuses. I clicked through screens for hours, frozen and scattered before the enormity of my Nano’s needs. I feel my Nano has betrayed me.

When I was a kid the Sears Roebuck catalogue was nicknamed the Dream Book. I pored over ours, picking out my Easter dress, the cornet my parents bought me for band. Sears labeled big budget items—like cornets—Good, Better, and Best. I urged my parents to buy me Best, but according to them Good and Better were good enough for me. I loved to look at the pages with the wedding bands, imagining my own glorious white wedding. (In every edition, wedding and engagement rings were cleverly placed smack dab in the middle of the catalogue, the hinge around which all other goods organized themselves.) At ten I thought yellow gold rings were tacky, befitting a Good or Better type person. I decided to go with white gold with diamonds, that would be really classy. When I married at the age of 35, I chose a vintage white gold wedding band with diamond chips. Some dreams never die.

With the advent of online customer reviewing, the dream has become lucid. We write love notes to phantom objects, we interact with other dreamers of images. We enter our judgments with passionate hyperbole. We exclaim this Jennifer Lopez movie sucks or I’m ordering a case of organic microwaved popcorn because I can’t live without it! We read avidly about the articles we’re considering bringing into our homes. We delight that 4.5 stars-worth of people loved a thing. But what about the .5 stars for whom the thing jammed leaked cracked or refused to whistle, for whom the thing was lacking in excitement, felt predictable, not true to size, inferior to the ones that used to be made in Germany? Anxiety wells. Objects should be reliable, stable, they should never fuck up or wear out before we tire of them—but here we’ve caught our coveted products unawares, first in the morning, when they’re hungover with smeared mascara and smoker’s breaths. Dare we click the Buy Now button?

Images of objects call out to us day and night. We could waste our whole life online pining for them. Some people even click in their sleep, in spells of so-called “blackout shopping.” From customer reviews of Ambien at Askapatient.com: “It would take a couple of hours to kick in, so I’d find myself getting up and going online and buying stuff. But not remembering it the next day!” “I have also purchased things online and until the strange packages would arrive, I had no idea anything was coming.” “I registered for a marathon one night and didn’t even know it. I wasn’t even a runner, but since I paid for it and booked the hotel and airfare I trained and ran it.” “I have done a lot of the things people have described here, phone calls, night walking, shopping online, which was horrifying because I woke up the next day and had to come up with the money to pay for everything I didn’t even remember buying.” “I have gotten some really weird things in the mail as a result of ‘black out shopping.’”

The body is still. The mind is focused. Consciousness merges with the object and its attributes. Ohmmmmmmm . . . ohmmmmmm . . . we are amazed, we shift into the Amazon, the Omazone. In the wake of shrinking book review sections of large dailies, bloggers are taking up the slack. No more chorus girl’s breakfast—coffee, cigarettes, and the morning paper. No more folding and crinkling, no more ink-smudged fingers. We sit in a desk chair, our eyes drink in light, our fingers click, we try not to spill coffee on the keyboard. Reaction to the book review upheaval has been emotional. The New York Times's Motoko Rich: “To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers—not surprisingly—see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books.” Who do we trust more—one effete reviewer in the New York Times or 269 Amazon customers? Who’s really going to lure our cursor to the BUY NOW button? When the cursor reaches the BUY NOW button it turns into a little white glove—a magician’s glove, for buying online is magic. We ache for things, we click, and a few days later things appear on our front steps.

Anyone can comment on books, anyone can comment on anything (because Amazon sells everything). The lofty towers of cultural capital have been leveled to the ground: poetry, jello, lube, films, Great Books, TV shows, Mane ‘n Tail Horse Shampoo and Conditioner are equalized in our electronic wash of consumption. My husband, Kevin Killian, has written over 1500 Amazon reviews. While he does formulate opinions of products, Kevin has seized upon the rich outsider potential of the Amazon review and fabricated a new literary form. The narrator of these reviews often bears little resemblance to the Kevin I know. For instance, in many recent reviews he describes his younger self as “an American boy growing up in rural France,” but my Kevin has never been to France. For a graduate writing seminar at San Francisco State in first person fiction, I assigned a selection of Kevin’s rural France series, and gave the following writing exercise: “Based upon a similar project by Kevin Killian, you will create a fictional character which you will develop through a series of at least 4 Amazon customer reviews. You will post your reviews online and bring copies for all.” CW 880 was comprised of an enormously talented and smart group of good sports. Nobody groused about the screwiness of this assignment; they jumped into it wholeheartedly, and the results so delighted me, I asked Fanzine to publish them. Some of the students declined to post insincere reviews on the Amazon website itself, so their work is published here for the first time, under the banner of fiction.

In these linked reviews fragmented subjectivities morph through a universe of things. At first we chuckle at the giddy zeal with which these narrators gush over an endless array of goods, but as the reviews accrete, life around the objects begins to feel emptied, endangered, as if the objects were reaching out of the computer and sucking all the air from the room. When commodities loom this large, who’s controlling whom—the possessor or the possessed? We tap into the horror of the doll that comes to life and creeps up on us in the middle of the night, the TV set or toaster that turns itself on. Desperation leaks from every sentence, betraying a lack so deep it’s impossible to say what the objects are replacing. As we publicly declare our desire for them, objects are freed from their subservience to narrative and the ego that drives it. Narrative becomes a mere prop in the object’s apotheosis.

Under the pen name “Jello Girl,” Lee Stegner wrote a series of reviews on Jello and its accoutrements. “If you’re panning for a man, someone at your party that melts your jello, present him with the sparkling ruby red stiletto. If you wear a matching lipstick, his eyes will move from the jello stiletto to your dazzling smile.” To our potluck the final day of class, she brought the Lime Jello Tuna Casserole she describes in her piece on “Kraft Jell-O Sugar-Free Gelatin Dessert, Lime.” She slid a knife around the edge of a copper mold and plopped out a bright green quivering mass, shaped like a giant bumpy Lifesaver and filled with tuna and mayonnaise and god knows what else. People looked at it a bit frightened. Even though she brought it as a hoot, Lee became concerned that no one was eating it. “Nobody’s eating my jello salad,” she exclaimed. “Don’t you want some jello salad, here I’ll cut you a slice.” Despite herself, Lee had become Jello Girl. It was inevitable. Deep down we were all Jello Girls, a tense truth we were trying to hide from one another. A couple of us were vegetarians, but the rest of us sampled her jello salad, and it tasted better than we had imagined.

—Dodie Bellamy