Daniel’s Reviews > The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven > Status Update
Daniel
is 24% done
Some nights I lay awake listening to my parents’ lovemaking. I know white people keep it quiet, pretend they don’t make love. My white friends say they can’t imagine their parents getting it on. I know exactly what it sounds like when my parents are touching each other. It makes up for knowing exactly what they sound like when they’re fighting. Plus and minus. Add and subtract. It comes out just about even.
— Feb 08, 2025 03:16PM
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Daniel’s Previous Updates
Daniel
is 17% done
"There must have been a hundred times he passed out on top of me. We’d be right in the middle of it, he’d say I love you, his eyes would roll backwards, then out went his lights. Sounds strange, but those were good times.” I was conceived during one of those drunken nights, half of me formed by my father’s whiskey sperm, other half formed by my mother’s vodka egg. I was born a goofy reservation mixed drink.
— Feb 08, 2025 02:07PM
Daniel
is 8% done
I was sitting at my desk at People to People when my Hanging Loose editor, Bob Hershon, faxed me an advance copy of the review. I read it once, ran to the bathroom to throw up, then returned to my desk to read one sentence again and again: “Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time.”
As Keanu Reeves, the Hawaiian balladeer, would say, “Whoa.”
— Feb 08, 2025 12:30PM
As Keanu Reeves, the Hawaiian balladeer, would say, “Whoa.”
Daniel
is 8% done
My mother constantly asked me why my poems didn’t rhyme.
“It’s free verse, and some of them do rhyme. I’ve written sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles. I’ve written in iambic pentameter.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the ba-bump, ba-bump sound of the heartbeat, of the deer running through the pine forest, of the eagle singing its way through the sky.”
“Don’t pull that Indian shaman crap on me,” my mother said.
— Feb 08, 2025 11:48AM
“It’s free verse, and some of them do rhyme. I’ve written sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles. I’ve written in iambic pentameter.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the ba-bump, ba-bump sound of the heartbeat, of the deer running through the pine forest, of the eagle singing its way through the sky.”
“Don’t pull that Indian shaman crap on me,” my mother said.
Daniel
is starting
Many people tell me that they had no picture of contemporary reservation life, or even urban Indian life, until reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. To break Indians out of museums and movies and Chief Wahoo—that’s a legacy for any book. The book and Smoke Signals gave many their first picture of contemporary Native American life.
— Feb 08, 2025 11:00AM
