Trying to control an 8x8 LED matrix according to Arduino.cc example

So how should I send two values to Arduino? For now I'm sending a list that looks like this: 52 32 48 10, which should tell Arduino to use column 4 and row 0, separated by a space and ended with a line feed. If there's a timeout problem with Serial.parseInt(), is there some alternative to sending a list to Arduino and then having Arduino route the different elements of the list to different variables?