. Spinning .

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.