One of my favorite cartoons—I think it was by Shel Silverstein—shows a couple of guys chained to an eighteen-foot cell wall, hung by their wrists, and their ankles are chained, too. Above them is a tiny barred window that a mouse couldn’t crawl through. And one of the guys is saying to the other, “Now here’s my plan.…” It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.… And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is
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