. Spinning .

Basically a story of human nature in resentment and jealousy, feelings of being an outsider, and how they are overcome and changed by face to face confrontation.

In this first person pov, a man gives us a setup of what is going on, in a very neutral reporting-style voice for the first half of the first paragraph.  The choice of words is as important as the voice and narrative structure which is made up of short, to the point statements:

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.  His wife had died.  So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut.  He called my wife from his in-law’s.  Arrangements were made.

The narrator seems almost as if he is holding back on details for fear of revealing his feelings.  There is much told by the reference to the man as "This blind man" rather Robert so and so, or even structuring the opening as "An old friend of my wife’s, a blind man…" which would in fact be less telling of his feelings than what he says.  His wording is one of clipped and obvious holding back.  His feelings do come out in the second half of this paragraph quite clearly:

I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit.  He was no one I knew.  And his being blind bothered me.  (…)A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

Even his admission of his feelings is succinct, and yet speaks volumes.  He "wasn’t enthusiastic" is how he starts it off, but the fact immediately come through that the reason is that the man is "no one (he) knew." This indicates a separation between his wife and himself in that the man is from her life, not his.  This is what he ranks first as his objection to the visit.  His next statement may seem flagrantly biased against the handicapped–which he has a right to be if he so wishes–yet there’s no sense of gentility about his language.  There almost appears to be an unconscious dig: "not something I looked forward to."

This will become more and more obvious as the story goes on, but the narrator refers to Robert as "the" or "this blind man", and his wife is always referred to in that way–as if to establish ownership.  There is a point he makes later on about names–and I’ll get to that.

It is the end of summer and the friends plan a camping trip up in Wisconsin.  John is in a good mood, got another haircut, and while we do not see his girlfriend Lita, I’m happy to see that perhaps his attitude is not completely dependent upon the relationship.

He does mention in the last panel of the first page that he remembers "seeing the lake through the trees" as they drive by.  I would take this as reinforcement of this change for him.  They drive through a storm and stop in a town to get something to eat.  Hassled by "rednecks" because one of them orders a vegieburger, they leave but one of them does take pictures of the townie hollering at them through the restaurant window. Strangely, while Porcellino chooses to give us a look at prejudice and stereotyping, it is from both sides: The townfolk make fun of John J. as being a "fuggin freak fairy" while John takes photos of the "rednecks" through the window as they leave. 

They avoid a fight and move on, stop and skateboard on the bridge at Two Rivers. Some nice sounds integrated into the panels here, the sounds of the boards (onomatopoeia) contrasting with the silence as John looks over the bridge at the river.

Almost out of gas, the pull into Appleton to fill up.  They pull out their skateboards but are warned by a girl who is a passenger in a car driven by an older man that the townfolk here hate skateboarders.  This part had this tune going through my head for days afterward.  The boys follow the man and girl to a campground where the two take off before the boys find a campsite.  Unable to do so, they camp right outside of it and John goes to sleep wondering if "that girl has sex…zzz…with the moustache guy…"  In the morning they sneak into the campground facilities to brush their teeth, then take a walk in the woods. 

In the finale of the story, the end of John’s adventurous, life changing summer, he notices "the air and the trees, and the sunlight breaking through the darkness."  This is a metaphor for his coming out of his depression and feeling of not belonging.  The world now appears real to him, and likely he feels a part of it.

For me, the story could have ended right  there, the point being made rather clearly.  Porcellino chooses to go on three more panels where the boys take off their shoes and wade in the stream in the woods, and John states "I was very happy."  This was a bit overkill and repetitious from the prior section, though it did negate some of the wariness I had at that point about the reason for his turnaround.

All in all, studied a bit more carefully than its surface story of teenage anxiety that’s been told a million times and experiences even more, Perfect Example could be said to be a precise and appropriate title.   

There is an excellent example here also of the use of graphics and text to go further into story than the idea of funny or power hero type comics that the medium is normally associated with to the unaware  (that’s me, too).  In particular, this is a memoir graphic novel that is considered nonfiction as it is based on the author’s recall of that summer between high school and college or so I assume, though he could be a junior since there was no mention of graduation and college applications would have been a bit late in May of their senior year. 

At any rate, it is a transitioning period for all of them as they leave one world and get ready to enter another, feeling the discomfort of having outgrown one and looking forward with some trepidation to the unknown.

While the drawings are a bit hokey, the simplicity serves its purpose to be be more abstract and thus easily accessible to the experience of a diversity of readers.  Certain elements of both story and comic strip effects have been used to accentuate the telling and showing of the narrative. 

Not my fav, but a good example of graphic story.

This section doesn’t start off with a mood display, though it does again start out with John waking up and planning to go out.  There is no indication of conflict of any sort, and we assume he has gotten over his heartbreak over Kristi. 

He appears also to have established more of a relationship with Mark, and the two of them go off to Wisconsin to see Mark’s grandfather.  This is a nice change we see in the way John reacts to spending time with the elderly gentleman, and we can see that he is inspired to spend some time practicing his guitar (panel shows quiet contemplation, a slight smile on the ride home). Indeed, once home, he picks up his guitar and starts putting some time into it.

One of the gang comes by and they decide to go for a ride and he reveals his confusion to his friend about his relationship with Lita.  They go see a friend who is depressed over his own breakup with his girl, and during the usual "well…who needs em anyhow?", we see a change in John’s thinking, indicated by a closeup of him in the last panel on the page (placement counts–panels are likely added or scrapped, enlarged or made smaller to get to this point, just as ending a chapter or tv drama before the commercial) with small circle eyes. 

His relationship with his mother seems to have improved, despite his longer than ever hair, and he willingly agrees to mow the lawn.  Four panels go by with just the rrrr of the mower when we see a sudden flash of insight as indicated by eyes showing beneath the shades, an open mouth, and several lines to indicate something is happening.  He realizes that his reaction to life is his own choice.

His new attitude is in place as he and a buddy go to the lake, along with Lita and her friend Anne and another John.  When invited to sit in back with the two girls, he does, and his feeling for Lita becomes defined for him (the heart shows before he actually makes up his mind to take the initiative and take her hand.  His heart leaves the spot on his chest and moves towards her.

At the lake he gets excited about life, joyfully splashes in the water and decides he wants to live.  He’s got a girlfriend.  Hah!

While this may sound like the ultimate happy ending, if you think about it, it’s not the best.  Why does he feel all his problems have been solved simply by having a girlfriend?  Isn’t this the same thing as a woman feeling incomplete without a male counterpart?  I’m happy for John that summer turned out well for him, and he realized that how he responds to people and things determines his happiness, but in responding to Lita’s interest in him–I’m not too sure how crazy he was about her, it’s likely he’d dump her in a New York Minute if Kristi showed up on his doorstep–he’s reinforcing his dependence on others for his happiness.

Maybe that’s why there’s a bit more to this story and it doesn’t just end here.

A few more points of interest on this section that I was too lazy to put in.  On all the sections, with the simplicity of the artwork, where you can barely tell the guys from the gals except for a couple of C’s (symbolic of C-cup  in adolescent dreaming?), the outdoor scenes are by contrast heavily detailed.  For example, the blades of grass are clear on every lawn.  Windowpanes, doors, bushes–they’re all there.   Perhaps it’s foreshadowing the last section where John loves mowing the lawn. There is also another use for these short straight lines besides indicating grass (pot?)

When John is feeling down as he watches Fred and Kristi together on the blanket, there is a radiance of lines on his chest and around his body as he sinks into himself, "back inside where there’s nothing alive."   He also has eyebrows and eyelashes in this closeup of his face, made up of…yep, short lines.

His real anger at being locked out of the house is also at himself and the world that doesn’t work the way he expects and wants it to.  Even his decision to commit suicide is thwarted when he can’t get inside his house.

While I see the ending of this section, where he is in Mark’s office building feeling not a part of the scene ("The faces of people and things around me, there were lights–but I didn’t see them…, sounds–but I didn’t hear them–) demonstrates his mental absence from the world around him.  He sees things (though he claims he doesn’t) going on, but just as with the parties and his friends, he doesn’t feel a part of it.  His conclusion, however, is:  "Because I saw then that life is like a dream."

First of all, he’s a cartoon character and he’s right, none of his world is real.

But, did he really land upon the concept of time and space and the immediacy, the transient nature of the present?  He may have, but I don’t believe he understands it in the same way because he hasn’t come to it from the more logical thought process of seeing the big picture, but rather as a reference to himself within a space.  I think what he’s doing here is turning the problem from blaming himself for being a jerk or a misfit, into a condition of the universe being not real, therefore, moving within it is not real.

Somehow, that makes him feel better.

It’s one thing to write "John was feeling alone, half in the world of his youth and in transition to the world of an adult.  It’s another to depend on graphics to get the point across.

There are some obvious tools available in simple facial expressions such as a smile, a frown, tears, wide-eyes and clenched teeth.  All these are emotional devices based on how we communicate without words. Slumped shoulders may indicate despair or feeling low. Porcellino has drawn characters that are easily followed in their moods by their expressions and a few of the more standard elements used in comic strip stories.  The image of the heart indicates John’s feelings for Kristi.  There are differences in mood and attitude indicated by open or closed eyes.  John’s eyes are closed when he is talking to his parents, indicating that he is effectively tuning them out. 

Panels without dialogue normally indicate a transition of scene or break in time.  Porcellino also uses them as a pause for the reader to consider a change in attitude or to emphasize a depth of mood (many frames, perhaps the character moving away from the reader/viewer). 

Porcellino also seems to use closeups and longviews to enhance the loneliness that John feels as he wonders about how he fits in with others.  He pans out to a city, a beach, a large dark area wherein John appears smaller and smaller.  All of these are tools for the graphic writer.

John sleeps till noon, doesn’t have a summer job, stays out until the early morning hours.  But he does have something going with Lita.  I love the panel where they’re laying on the couch making out, signified by "smack kiss etc."  Yet once they’re interrupted by a phone call, John is feeling down again.  He goes to a party and Kristi is there; his heart jumps out of his body (yes it does–look at the panel).  Kristi has never given him an answer and she wanders off to talk to others.  Lita shows up and it’s obvious that she likes him a lot, but he isn’t into her–blames himself for not allowing himself to be happy. 

On this particular night, John’s hair grows quickly.  His buddy Fred offers him a ride and that’s when he suspects that Fred and Kristi are a couple.

A week later Fred and Kristi pick him up to go watch fireworks.  John’s never felt so alone than being the third wheel and watching them together.  His hurting is shown by several silent panels of Fred and Kristi, John’s heart falling on the ground, and his eyes are closed.  His form and body language as drawn by Porcellino are simple visual signs of his internal stressing.

Back home (with the sun shining?) John’s frustration and anger overflow, especially as he finds himself locked out of his house.  Banging on the door, sobbing, he slides down to the ground, wondering where his family is.  Here there is a panel blank except for an image of lines radiating from a center.

A "smarter" friend finds him, takes him for a ride and they stop where the friend works.  Here is another revelation: " Because I saw then that life is like a dream."

In this last panel of this section, we see what looks like ocean waves with a crescent moon and single star in the sky.  Symbolic, I’d think, of a feeling of being small and alone.

The boredom of the in-between summer sees John and his friends going to a concert where Chuck Berry staggers onstage and off again without singing.  Loved the little "X" of an eye on one of the concertgoers (why are there no page numbers?) which is a standard comic book sign for "out of it" either by being hit on the head or from drinking as reinforced here by the cup in his hand. 

The male quandry of making the first move in a relationship is brought up as four girls walk by and Fred is the first to finally go after them and start a conversation.  Blah-blabs and ha ha’s are exchanged to indicate that a connection has been made.

An aside: the necessary music of the radio is often playing in the car or at home, indicated by a line or two of song lyrics and drawn notes.  The tendency to drive fast–or movement at all– is indicated by the burst of exhaust from the cars.   One of the guys runs into the girls the next day or so and they are all invited to one of the girls’ houses.  They stop and pee in the bushes on the way.  It’s a macho guy thing. They all go for a ride and John feels a connection with Stephanie, yet worries that she doesn’t like him, and worse, what if Kristi decides in the meantime to be his girlfriend?

A week or so goes by and John borrows his mom’s car to go see his friends–rather calm mama here for her son going out every night until four and five a.m.

John goes to this party and is surprised to see his friend Fred drinking beer (?) and realizes that they are each going their own way since they’d previously all agreed that "drinking was stupid." He wants to leave, runs into a girl named Lita that he know (indicated by dashes to from eyes to object) and unfortunately, Lita doesn’t make much of an impact as he takes off.  Somehow he’s transferred from his mom’s car to a skateboard…

Here he comes up with another profundity: he doesn’t feel he fits in with his friends , everything "seems transparent and sad’ — even as the detail within the panels of the road, houses, and blades of grass become more defined. 

Depressed, he goes back to the party and hides in his friend’s bedroom alone until Lita comes in and they make out until four a.m.  John is more confused than ever now.

In this episode–what I’ve been calling the separate "books" or stories within this work–we get a closer look into John’s psyche and his depression. 

Porcellino opens with environment, showing an image of John’s house in Hoffman Estates, IL that indicates middle-class neighborhood, and one of my questions from the earlier story is answered: John’s bedroom is in the basement.  Previously, he was awakened and went upstairs for breakfast. This is one of the cool things about comics/graphic novels: it is the epitomy of "show, don’t tell."

So John’s depressed, as evidenced not only by his apparent boredom, but by his near fetal position as he sorts out his thoughts.  He is talked to by his parents and told to get a haircut.  He asks his sister to give him one and amid falling hair, we see that his sister is also upset, wondering "Why do they hate us?"  So she’s likely not much older than John.  As he views himself in the mirror, hair cut short as his parents required, he wonders about the purpose of life.  "People, places, things come and go, but they’re no more real than shadows on a wall."  Here I detect a more adult thinking about the world and life, trying to put it all into perspective, going beyond the immature "me" to signify a relationship with all mankind in its common question.

John goes out with his best friend Fred for a ride and a walk down the railroad tracks (symbolic perhaps of the beginning of a journey) and they ask each other their plans after high school graduation.  John isn’t sure and while he mentions joining Greenpeace, he is easily swayed by his buddy’s derision.  Meanwhile, Fred knows that he’s going to Northern (editorial note: Northern Illinois University) and suggests that John join him, however, Fred knows it’s in DeKalb, but doesn’t seem to know where that is…

John returns home in a much better mood after his time spent with Fred (patting the dog which he previously pushed aside when he left the house) and decides to call Kristi to ask her to be his girlfriend.  Still in a good mood, he writes in his journal "Something I learned today, never look straight int the sun’s rays."  However, these two panels are different–evidently indicating a different time and we see also that John’s hair is long here. 

While the panels continue in their straight-edged format, John’s hair is a long as he meets with Kristi and asked her to be his girl.  She naturally leaves him hanging and we go back to the dreamlike edges of her answer and his remark, "letting all the sun shine in." 

His reflection returns to the day of the haircut, and even his dog is asleep which prompts "nothing at all to depend on, sometimes I don’t even feel like I’m alive."

John evidently did apply to Northern (and we hope he learns where it is before September) and tells his mother who greatly approves.  There is one panel where they just stand there looking at each other without conversation, and this may symbolize a turning point in their relationship. 

John is happy, thinking about college, goes to the library, and totally doesn’t listen as the librarian asks him to leave the skateboard outside.  He’s in the "Weirdo, Neat Stuff, Love and Rockets" book section. We begin to wonder if John is truly ready for college.  There is a thunderstorm as John walks home,  and the story ends with the ominous "and the summer had just begun."

Interesting, more so than the first quick read-through.  Still, there is a sense that things will continue in an up and down pattern for our protagonist.  But then, isn’t this a "Perfect Example" of life for the average person?

One thing that I love about Carver’s work is his frankness in expression, unaffected by the fear of political correctness and yet he gets the meaning across in a down-to-earth manner that is more effective because a lot of people can recognize themselves in the the humanness of the flaws of the characters.

The narrator/husband is obviously flippant and resentful of his wife’s associations with her first husband, but even more so, with Robert, "the blind man."  Yet he has opportunity to sympathize with Robert because he just recently lost his wife.  How does our narrator see something to which he can feel superior?  This:

“They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding.”

That’s an incredible commentary on a relationship. 

There probably was a similar feature in Windows Word but I never used it.  This is Mac’s iPages and the sidespace with comments that make it so easy to make notations as I read.  I’ve got to figure out if it can be printed this way–neat idea for workshopping (and prof’s notes) so that it’s easier to read commentary.

I do like Raymond Carver’s work and so I decided to start on this a little earlier, found it online and printed it out (some things don’t change–it’s easier to mark and read, though I may try sticking it into iPages and using their comment feature, just for grins). 

Just a couple pages in, but these things shout out to me: short, clipped sentences; little imagery, first person pov is really telling of the emotion–yet saying without saying.  On this last point, I get a strong feeling of resentment on the part of the first person narrator, the husband, towards the blind man–beyond the obviously stated.  For example, while he offers "But instead of dying, she got sick.  She threw up.  Her offier–why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?–" that clearly shows disdain for his wife’s first husband, it points out clearly that he narrator did not give a name to "the blind man" either up to this point in the story and yet it has focused on him more definitely than anyone else, even starting his story out with "This blind man…"

A lot of information given here in the opening, and we get a clear view of the narrator through his descriptions and opinions of others.  There is a jealousy over his wife’s associations with the other two men.

More to come.

Rereading this for class, slower, more carefully.  I still don’t particularly care for it, but that doesn’t matter because there are some good things here to be found.

The first segment, Belmont Harbor, has a basic story of John waking up, going to school, seeing his friends, making plans to go places, and a turning point when his friends buy liquor and John finds pills in his friend Tina’s room.  John chooses not to partake, and naturally there’s the feeling of being uncool of which teens are so deathly afraid.

There’s the need to be one of the crowd and the loneliness that is exaggerated in John’s mind.  There’s the boredom and frustration that can best be described by ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ –though that doesn’t really change with age, those words sometimes being the best descriptor of a situation–but the indiscriminate use is half reasonable and half just rebellion and effect.  The problems of young people are always the same, so the story is not exciting except perhaps in its appeal for that very reason: everybody’s been there.

The comic strip is as intricate in its use of panels and graphic expression as hypertext is with its paths and text boxes.  I feel Porcellino’s artwork is not as great as many I’ve seen, yet it does have a simplicity that is perhaps more likely to invite a feeling of commonality or empathy.  While certain series of panels seem to go on a bit longer than I would see as necessary–particularly the last section where there are about 16 panels indicating John’s separateness from his friends and his resulting depression.  I also didn’t quite follow the symbolism in the revelation he seems to find which comprises the last 5 panels.

There’s a particularly interesting effect when John is in Tina’s house looking around at her things, as if learning about her by examining her environment.  When he finds and asks her about a small vial and she answers, "poppers," there’s a change in the mood.  Porcellino shows this nicely: An empty ‘thought balloon,’ is John’s response.  In the next panel, Tina is talking, but her text balloon just shows some tiny dots–John evidently is not listening.  More importantly, Tina does not have a body, just her head. She has lost something of her identity to John.  This is one of the great things about comic strips and graphic novels that is different from the techniques used in text.

It will be interesting to get more insight on this from the other students.

Was just this minute reading Lonnie Ann’s journal review on this story and about to click in a comment, but…

My husband walks in from the garage and asks me a question. 

"What did you say?" I ask him

"What are the white things," he says, "those things on the table out there."

They are the heating elements from the old stove we threw out of the shop, I thought we could use them in the grill.

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da (Theme from Twilight Zone).

Well, if you take out all the bad words this might go over with a third-grader.  I honestly can’t imagine a teenager reading this outside of required reading to find the literary value in it.

Scott McCloud has some great information in his books about how the comic strip is an art form and how it works in narrative structure.  The simpler the illustration, the more relative it becomes.  Porcellino’s drawings are simple, yet I do not believe that they are minimal yet offer the most impact.  There are often places where many frames are sequenced to indicate a mood whereas a frame or two might have better served the emotion. 

I will be reading it again and looking forward to class discussion to hopefully discover what I am obviously overlooking in the value of this story.

Honestly, I find it hard to believe that just because it’s in cartoon form that young adults will accept the moral at the heart of the story:

I see now that I create my own unhappiness.  The things that happen to me aren’t in themselves good or bad…it’s the way I react to them that makes them good or bad.

This profundity hits our teenage protagonist as he is mowing the lawn.

Like, who cares?