Quality of Book Report

On Saturday, I decided to read what was left of the book I'd cut for my last OA project, Meghan Daum's "The Quality of Life Report".

There was enough left for me to understand the story and not feel like I'd missed anything, but to be honest, I'm not too sad now that I cut the book. It was all right, and funny in parts, making what I guess America calls a decent "beach read." I still didn't like the protagonist very much, nor the end at which the book arrived.

Lucinda Trout is a TV producer from New York who, after an assignment in Prairie City, decides to relocate there in the hopes of discovering that easier, slower-paced farm life, apparently the fantasy of many harried city dwellers.

I might be the wrong person to write a review of this book, maybe because I did the opposite by leaving my own quiet province for Metro Manila, maybe because my priorities are vastly different from Lucinda's, or maybe because she's American. If Ms. Daum's objective was to write "Moving to a Small Town, You're Doing it Wrong," I guess she succeeded, but she didn't make Lucinda someone I could root for in the process.

Observe.

- Lucinda leaving New York for Prairie City and thinking of the latter as a sleepy hick town is way off, based on the kind of lifestyle she's able to sustain. In the beginning, she made Prairie City out to be something like the isolated farm town of Holt, Colorado in Kent Haruf's "Plainsong", or worse, someplace with few phone or power lines and maybe no running water. But it's more like she moved from Metro Manila to General Santos, where the malls, businesses both local and franchised, and landscaped central park are enough to tell you you're far from the middle of nowhere.

- Lucinda's first friends are the community leaders, possibly elites, who change cars every year and own a big house with a pool in the backyard. Most of her encounters with people from lower income brackets are when she interviews/exploits people for her show and when she's in line at the local supermarket.

- She's kind of stupid with her money. Knowing that her pay-per-used-segment income will likely be inconsistent, one of the first things she does is get a co-branded credit card for a furniture store. "Oh, I might not be earning enough money. Rather than budget wisely and try to save, I'm going to get myself into debt to support my need for interior design! Yay, eggplant door panels!" Kaya nagka-financial crisis sa States, e.

- She then springs, not for a modest studio or a little cabin, but for a huge apartment in a suburban area and all this Martha Stewart-type junk to decorate it.

- She does this a second time, for a more expensive place, with her new boyfriend whose own money goes to child support for his three kids.

- The new place is isolated and sort of a farm, but she doesn't know how to take care of it. She's helpless without the boyfriend around to play the brawny farmhand.

- She buys a car. Sure, it's secondhand, but doesn't this place have a bus system?

- When she gets depressed, she blows more money on tanning and fake nails. I thought the point of moving to the country was to find inner peace by living off the land. She could at least have planted a vegetable garden.

In the end (SPOILER ALERT?), Lucinda realizes that instead of truly improving her quality of life, she's deluded herself into thinking that she can get her rural fantasy without actually working for it. It's a great moral, sure, but I just feel like there could have been less shallow, less obvious ways for her to learn it.

There's also a disturbing, second conclusion (ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT?) to Lucinda's tale, which I think she touches on but kind of chickens out of exploring: it's people who experience inertia, not cities. The inertia she experienced as a New Yorker too complacent to leave her highly urbanized cocoon is not unlike the inertia that sucks the people of Prairie City into the ground. In a similar vein, the concerns and conversations had by her giggly girlfriends and bitchy employer in New York are just as absurd as those of the Prairie City socialites who surround her.

Maybe this is the main reason I don't like Lucinda's story. She thinks she's changed into a better person, but really, it's not by much. Fast life, slow life--it doesn't matter if you don't actually go anywhere.

Whiteout-popup Quality of Life Report

Two months ago, I saw this post by Adam David (possibly NSFW) calling for blackout poem / "visual erasure" contributions. I thought it might be a good exercise for my popup buildings, as well as to maybe work out my love-hate relationship with the city while telling a story.

I missed the "Erase Erase" deadline, though, so I decided to just post the work here. Click on each thumbnail to enlarge (they're arranged in order from left to right, like a regular book; filenames are numbered if you're confused).

Just some notes, which you don't have to read.

It was harder than I thought, to pick something that was inexpensive even for Booksale (P45), had the right title, at first glance held the kinds of words I was seeking, and, most importantly, wouldn't feel like a huge loss once I started cutting out pages. Meghan Daum's "The Quality of Life Report" fit the bill more than anything else I saw (I ended up buying more than one book that day) because the blurb on the back made it sound like the kind of sweetly cheesy, "I'm Reed Fish"-type of story that I'd probably catch on Star Movies during off seasons.

This is probably blasphemy to any book-lover, but I didn't even read the book before cutting into it. The deadline was pretty close, and I haven't had a lot of time to read; the last thing I read, I finished last week but bought in late February. I did end up reading the cut pages, though, and I felt bad afterward. It did sound like an interesting and well-written story after all. So, if you ever read this, Ms. Daum, please accept my sincerest apologies, as well as a promise to buy your book if I ever see another copy in a local store. Your other book sounds interesting as well.

How I made it: I chose the words first, sliced out those pages, and sketched the buildings and skylines I wanted to put over/under them. The buildings themselves didn't take more than two or three hours to plot and cut for each spread, if you don't count the spreads discarded for wrong measurements or cuts. I used black crayon on the parts of the book page that would show up behind the buildings, then glued the pages onto the back while trying to get the words to line up with the windows before the glue* dried.

In the end, though, work and other things took up my time, and I finished the last spread just on Sunday. The photos and layout (if you can call it that) were done this morning after I woke up. I desaturated everything on my computer because my camera's white balance was acting funny.

The whole project was fun but also tiring in that I kept coming up against my own lack of imagination for these buildings. Now that I'm aware of it, though, I'll keep trying to come up with more interesting things in the future.

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*Boring notes about glue: Elmer's white glue comes in the easiest bottle to work with, but God help you if your paper's not perfectly aligned when you stick it on; this stuff dries fast. Elmer's "school" blue glue gives you time to push the paper into place before it dries, but if you use too much, some parts of the paper will look permanently wet and dark. Locally made Sti-Kee (?) glue works the same way without the wet look, but the bottle is a pain to work with because some idiot thought a glue "spreader" next to the nozzle was a good idea, when really, it just gets in the way of everything. The glue's also so thick that it comes out of the bottle in globs instead of a neat line.