before i lose my style

meghanagain:

coldgod:

God bless the goddamn internet.

This (half-assed, bitchy/entitled Amazon review of Kevin’s absolutely excellent, kind, funny, smart Let’s All Find Awesome Jobs) makes me so, so angry. Also guess what! Another thing that makes me angry is that there is another review for the book that goes, “Could as easily be a post in a blog on the internet.” 

I’m excising most of what Meg wrote because it’s about how loathsome the Boingboing-Libertarian mentality is, and I agree with that so much that I gave a paper on it at a conference. But I want to say a thing about this first part. 

I bought a copy of How I Learned to Love You From Far Away (and, later, Jennifer Love Hewitt Times Infinity). You might not know this, because I did not post a picture of myself holding it. I don’t tend to think of myself as the type of person who would post a picture of himself holding a chapbook he bought on the internet. 

But the thing is, I didn’t think of myself as the type of person who would buy a chapbook on the internet. And if not for the pictures of my friends holding chapbooks they bought on the internet, I might not have considered buying it in the first place. So that sort of deflates that. 

Now I can’t speak specifically to Kindle value or whatever, because I have never even held one. But! I can’t imagine it’s that different from my experience with the printed chapbooks. Certainly the stories could as easily be a post in a blog on the internet. But if Kevin posted a link to that post, I would happily ⌘-click on it! And maybe I’d read it, or maybe I’d leave it open in a tab for a while, and then bookmark it in case my browser crashed and my tabs couldn’t reload, and then never read it. The transformation of reading “internet stories” from a chore to a joy is worth the price of admission. (This is not an indictment of internet writers; we all get exhausted by the internet.) I imagine this is just as true for Kindle users. 

Also? The review above is talking about hype. And I agree that many of Kevin Fanning’s fans are very vocal in their support. But I suspect that would be less the case if paying for a chapbook on your Kindle or in your mailbox, rather than “not paying for anything,” was the natural thing for a person to do. My theory is that internet apathy leads people to present Kevin Fanning recommendations as fundraiser-style sales pitches. (Also we have a bunch of mutual friends and that complicates my reading of their no doubt genuine praise.)

Fanning writes some great stories, some good stories, and some alright stories. I am disinclined to elaborate because I suspect I will be misconstrued by those searching for yet another excuse not to buy his chapbooks. Suffice it to say I enjoyed reading them. I also enjoyed What I Want and What I Want, a chapbook I bought after being intrigued by an excerpt posted on Tumblr…by none other than Kevin Fanning. I don’t “love the guy,” but I love reading stories that are great, and I find it totally natural to pay for them.