I used to consider myself a kind of scholar or at least connoisseur of annoyingness. This was back when I was younger; I really tried to dip hard into things I found particularly annoying, in search of their particular grating essence. Life’s Little Instruction Book. Student Leader magazine. The trailer for The Myth of Fingerprints. Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten is less annoying than you expect, although that does not mean it is not annoying.
At the time I considered the ne plus ultra of annoying—and perhaps it has been surpassed, but self-preservation forced me “out of the game” and I no longer study these things—to be the ArtCarved college ring catalog.
Those are three different catalogs, above—the mid-’90s editions, which are the ones I kept in my “collection.” They’re what I’ll be quoting from.
Part of the glory of the ArtCarved catalog is the word-salad sub-Chat-GPT nonsense with which it is filled. Watch it make a bunch of assumptions about you:
You have invented your own life. You are at ease. Show them who you are. Where you have been says volumes about your path. Demonstrate the trajectory of your lifetime. Up. Straight up. Let your brilliance shine. Softly, as the light in your happy eyes.
“Happy eyes” sells it for me. But of course this abomination against taste is not alone:
Send signals. Signs of who you are. Your belief in excellence, your understated nature. The confidence of no glitz. Quiet power. Confidence is magnetic to itself. As is excellence. Wear the magnet. Be the magnet. Give the sign.
These sentence fragments are appalling! “As is excellence”! It demands to be read in a beat-poetry cadence, and yet it would be incredibly annoying even if written in big-kid sentences. Why would I want to send a signal to everyone about my understated nature (let alone my belief in excellence—who’s agnostic on excellence?)?
This is all bad enough, but what’s really wonderful (by which I mean terrible) about the catalogs are their character pieces. Like a modern-day Theophrastus, ArtCarved offers us quick glimpses into the personalities of different types of people—the people who buy ArtCarved rings! Here is my favorite (by which I mean my least favorite):
In what possible world is Voltaire the antithesis of army boots, such that Overalls there can base her identity on the quirkiness of their juxtaposition? The fourth most famous Goth cartoonist is named Voltaire: Do you think he never wears army boots? Why Voltaire?
This pull quote is like a haiku of annoying, where every word (even that damned ellipsis) does so much work! “Thank you” she says. No one in human history has ever been this much of a poser.
This one’s good (by which I mean bad), too! These two preppie dweebs also made the back cover
where they continue to be so bland that they literally blot out the sky, but the key thing about the O. Henry story, told breathlessly (by which I mean by someone who is out of breath and can only pant out more sentence fragments) by the female lead, is that it is transparently false. At least Voltaire Overalls had a sales argument: “If you’re a rebellious (?) intellectual (?), an ArtCarved ring will match your esthetic.” What are the Two Henries here telling us? “If you buy an ArtCarved ring, there is a trivial but nonzero chance you will get a cute story out of it?”
Also, “Gift of the Magi” is not about picking out matching gifts. That’s the opposite of what “Gift of the Magi” is about.
Perhaps I should have more sympathy for whoever has to write this garbage. I mean, despite what the covers of all three catalogs claim, class rings are not really a tradition any more at most schools, if they ever were, but ArtCarved can only pay the bills if it dupes people into thinking they are. And yet here once again, but for completely different reasons, we are in the realm of the false. When was the last time you were in the doctor’s office, reading a diploma on the wall, and began to fret: But where is the class ring? In no one’s mind are the two yoked.
And of course, the lie is only part of it. The main part is the restrained wackiness of feeding your boyfriend a chip. It’s so restrained that he has to guide the chip home by grabbing her wrist. I’m gritting my teeth so hard I can feel it behind my eyes. Is anyone else having this visceral reaction? I’ll only show one more. Let’s see how sweaty and desperate ArtCarved can get.
Pretty sweaty and desperate.
Perhaps the whole world has become an ArtCarved catalog now, which explains why I mostly stay in my basement reading old comic strips. In the old days it seemed so innocent, the idea of digging into the lower depths of bad culture, watching infomercial after infomercial and laughing like Beavis and/or Butthead. But conspiracy theories used to seem fun and innocent, too, and suddenly Q-Anon has stormed the Capitol. I didn’t see that coming. If we are not all murdered from above by autocrats we will inevitably die a less glorious death from below, the slow death of despair as all human discourse begins to sound like:
The future. It is ahead of us. We are ahead of it. We will take all of our college years with us, into it. It will be perfect, it will be ours. Our standards, our principles embodied in a ring of tradition. It whispers success. It says we’ve made it. Our own.
As long as this paragraph exists, no one in the world can be strong or happy.1
Oh! And look! Voltaire Overalls is back, and polishing the future!
Cruelly negative reviews
As you may have heard, I write books for a living, and when you write books, getting negative reviews is just part of the game. Here are two mediocre reviews for Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods I pulled off Amazon:
I’m paraphrasing Borges, as always.
How very 90s, like a knock-off J. Peterman catalog...it really is an impressive piece of annoyingness!