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rcnatas · 5 years

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( cis female ) haven’t seen RENATA “REN” CASTILLO around in a while. the ARIELA BARER lookalike has been known to be (+) DAUNTLESS & (+) ASSIDUOUS, but SHE can also be (-) OVERCRITICAL & (-) PERFECTIONIST. The 19 year old is a SOPHOMORE majoring in CRIMINAL JUSTICE. I believe they’re living in AUDAX but I popped by earlier and no one answered the door. ( ingrid. 20. pst. she/her. )

i have... no self control woops ! ren is a really new muse but i love her sm already and i’m excited to play her, i’d love to get some plots so pls hmu !! or like this and ill come message u !! THIS is her board !!

background !

she grew up in queens, nyc. the youngest of 3. her dad was born in brooklyn to mexican immigrants and her mom is from mexico city, she was studying abroad in nyc when she met him and ended up staying.

ren is the only girl, her 2 other brothers are lorenzo and cesar. she was closer to lorenzo who was the eldest since cesar was always picking on her hsdjkfhsjkf

despite being the youngest and the only girl, she wasn’t spoiled by any means or anything. except by lorenzo, who would do anything for his baby sister :/

she was a really quiet and shy kid, would barely speak when in public unless it was extremely necessary, but she did talk more at home with the people she trusted

lorenzo became a police officer when ren was around 9 and ever since she looked up to him, she highkey wanted to be like him

she was determined to become a police detective

TW DEATH; about 2 years ago lorenzo was shot and killed in the line of duty. by this time cesar was away studying in lockwood, ren and her parents moved to rochester to be closer to cesar and as a way to try and heal?? her mother believed a change of scenery and whatnot would probably help them but,, it really didn’t do much

so ren finished her senior year of high school in rochester. such a sudden change like this was really hard for her and it was difficult for her to adjust so her senior year was lowkey a nightmare

despite everything renata still had the same goals. but her parents forbid her from majoring in criminal justice or anything in the like bc they knew she was gonna pursue a career as a detective as well and theyre just scared and don’t want renata ending up as lorenzo so !! they said they would only pay for her studies if she majored in something else

she’s a sneaky lil shit and basically made them believe she’s majoring in biology (her favorite hs subject fdjhghj) but surprise bitch she’s really studying criminal justice and her original goals stand ! we love a stubborn bitch

connection to tatiana

they met through renata’s older brother, cesar (who is the same age as tatiana),cesar and tatiana were either dating or just hooking up, either way renata didn’t trust tatiana and she’d advice her brother to not go out with her, which only ended up in tatiana disliking/bullying renata so she would back off. SHORT ANSWER, tatiana was renata’s bully. however, she did not choose tatiana’s name during the watershed, ig she has morals or whatever

other info

she’s still really shy but definitely not as quiet and now at least tries to pretend shes not shy . fake it til u make it right

will always talk about how GAY she is but really shes more .. bisexual so shes a fake

shes SUCH a little nerd. probably likes to sit in the front row during lectures

she can list every pokemon

will say weird facts about the human body when bored/nervous

o r g a n i z e d

in fact she’s lowkey a little amy santiago don’t @ me

ren LOVES to play bass, and she’s really good at it but she’s too shy to show anybody that isn’t a close friend ?? tho she probably posts covers on some instagram acc or smth

was raised catholic but right now she’s really distant from it / doubting everything

has a lot of band t shirts

uses memes and bad humor to hide her Emotions

wcs !

cOuSins , she probably has a big family so !!

i would love some childhood friends that grew up in queens too or near the area bc my poor bb feels so alone

maybe someone who went to the same high school as the one she transferred to for their senior year?? and they were nice to her bc she was a nervous mess? ?

a roommate !! her family isn’t rich by any means and they already put 2 other sons thru college so they're on a budget lmao !

someone that makes her super flustered and she’s just so shy around them pls i love ,,, Softness

maybe someone who helps her lie to her parents about her major? like someone who can help her fake grades and shit to make it look like she’s actually majoring in biology

ppl that can make her come out of her comfort zone, make her try new things and shit !! she’s NOT unexperienced she’s just shy about it and doesn’t like to talk about that shit bc she gets all flustered but pls

give me a girl that just has her head over heels thanks !

she hasn’t had a proper girlfriend/boyfriend but maybe someone who was ALMOST that ?? and now it’s all awkward bc nothing ever happened ??

people who know cesar (her brother) and thats how they know her maybe?? cesar is 24 and graduated from lockwood so !!

idk literally anything else !!

#water:intro #i hope this.. shows up ! pls come plot w me im a thirsty hoe #my latina ass cant ever nOT play latinos jkdfnskjf its a flaw #death tw

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faithfulnews · 4 years

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Work, Play, Poetry

By Anthony Domestico

March 4, 2020

The life of the late novelist Robert Stone was filled with improbabilities. As Madison Smartt Bell puts it in his new biography, Stone, whose globe-spanning novels took on American history and the American soul, had “a taste for marijuana and alcohol (and for quaaludes and opiates).” In the 1960s, Stone was friends with Ken Kesey; you can imagine how much imbibing that entailed. While in Vietnam on a reporting trip, he experimented with heroin. (He “snorted, smoked, [and] possibly drank it on one occasion,” Bell writes.) Yet Stone lived to the ripe age of seventy-seven, writing a strong novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, two years before he died in 2015. “A connoisseur of women of all varieties,” Bell writes, perhaps a little too forgivingly, “Bob was far from above the occasional fling.” He had an open marriage—so open that he had a child with a family friend in the 1960s and a tempestuous affair with a younger writer three decades later. Yet he stayed with his wife Janice for fifty-five years. By Bell’s reckoning, and it seems accurate, theirs was a happy marriage.

But the most pleasant surprise, for me at least, was the decades-long friendship Stone had with Marilynne Robinson. What a literary odd couple they make: Robinson the proud Calvinist and Stone the lapsed Catholic; Robinson known best for her quiet, lovely novels about mid-century Iowa and Stone known best for his wild, prophetic novels—A Hall of Mirrors (1967), A Flag for Sunrise (1981), and others—all probing the manic brain and corrupted heart of American empire. What must the two writers have talked about? The nature of God, I’m sure. (Stone in an interview: “As a result of having been a Catholic, I’m acutely aware of the difference between a world in which there’s a God and a world in which there isn’t.”) The nature of craft, I imagine. (Stone taught at Johns Hopkins and Yale, among other places.)

Bell was friends with Stone, and his affection for his subject comes through. Writing in the first person, Bell recreates trips the two took to Haiti and conversations they had about fiction’s moral purpose. Despite this love, though, Bell doesn’t hold back, especially when it comes to the suffering brought on by Stone’s addictions. The last hundred or so pages are difficult to read, an onslaught of car crashes—Stone was a terrible driver, even when sober—narcotic dependence, increasingly frequent falls, and an attempted suicide. Stone was charismatic, everyone agrees. He was also destructive, to others occasionally and to himself consistently.

Bell is an accomplished novelist in his own right, and Child of Light, like a good work of fiction, lives through its details. Stone “huffed as much oxygen as possible in a back room of Politics and Prose” before giving a reading. David Milch, the producer of Deadwood, put Stone on the payroll at his production company to give him something to do, and some money, after a stint in rehab. Annie Dillard and Joy Williams vacationed with Stone in the 1990s. (Dillard and Stone went white-water tubing in Missoula and saw a brown bear.)

Stone’s writing offers an imaginative record of America’s political and spiritual dimensions: “That is my subject,” Stone wrote, “America and Americans.” Bell reads this wild life and lasting achievement with grace and sympathy.

Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone Madison Smartt Bell Doubleday, $35, 608 pp.

Baseball here is a business, and Nemens gives it to us from all angles

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is the best baseball novel ever written, and I won’t hear otherwise. But The Cactus League, the first novel by Paris Review editor Emily Nemens, is also very good.

If Nemens’s debut is not quite in the same league as The Universal Baseball Association, that’s partly because it’s playing a different game. Coover’s is a postmodern novel about the postmodernism of America’s pastime. (We often care less about the game itself than about its statistical representations—batting averages and win shares.) Nemens’s is a work of straightforward realism. Baseball here is a business, and Nemens gives it to us from all angles: superstar outfielders losing fortunes at the gambling table; groupies hanging out by the bullpen; agents hushing up scandals; elderly stadium organists whose stiff hands can’t hit the keys they once could.

The Cactus League takes place in Arizona during spring training. Each chapter, nine in all, follows a different figure associated with the imaginary Los Angeles Lions franchise. Most of the particulars are right. Nemens knows that Notre Dame’s baseball team is in the ACC, and she nicely skewers the increasing encroachment of hot tubs and goofy sound effects in new ballparks. A lovely small detail: Jason Goodyear, the book’s self-sabotaging superstar, gets a signature sneaker—“the first time they’d named a shoe after a ballplayer since Griffey.”

Not everything works. No fan would call a pitcher a “fastballer,” as one character does. (At least it’s not “speedballer,” à la Bruce Springsteen.) No partial owner could demand that a prominent outfielder be traded because of sexual jealousy—and then have it happen within days. (Partial owners don’t have that much power; star players don’t get traded overnight, especially when their replacement has only played college ball.) Such details wouldn’t much matter in a postmodernist romp. They do here.

But the pacing is good and the prose generally strong. Nemens refuses to engage in the romanticizing many fall into when spring comes around. Bartlett Giamatti famously and poetically said that baseball “is designed to break your heart.” After all, Giamatti rhapsodizes, “the game begins in spring…blossoms in the summer…[and] leaves you to face the fall alone.” Fair enough. But Nemens shows how baseball also breaks your heart for more prosaic reasons: because rotator cuffs fray, because spring-training towns are depressing, and because billion-dollar franchises don’t give a fig about poetry.

The Cactus League Emily Nemens Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27, 288 pp.

In baseball, there can come a point when you’ve so often been described as underrated that you cease to be underrated. Trot Nixon, for example: a decent right fielder in the early 2000s who Red Sox fans so often dubbed underrated that he became overrated. Charles Portis, the Arkansas-born novelist who was famous for being underrated and who died on February 17, never suffered this fate. There’s a certain kind of greatness that, no matter how many times we remark upon it, will always be underrecognized.

People who know Portis, whose out-of-print novels were reissued in the 1990s, probably know him as the author of True Grit. It’s a great novel, and it’s been made into two great movies. But every shaggy-dog story he wrote, every picaresque comedy of American naiveté and dreaminess, was great. His sentences display a funny, poetic, loose yet disciplined, absolutely American prose style. Since his death, fans have been passing around some of their favorite passages. Here are a few of my own. From The Dogs of the South: “I don’t believe we’ve ever had a President, unless it was tiny James Madison with his short arms, who couldn’t have handled Dupree in a fair fight.” From Masters of Atlantis: “It’s not healthy, locking yourself away in here so you can eat pies and read all these monstrous books with f’s for s’s.”

Rest in peace, Charles Portis.

The Dogs of the South and Masters of Atlantis

For decades, the poet and critic Paul Mariani has been a shining light for those interested in the Catholic imagination. We can hear Gerard Manley Hopkins, that great poet of the dark night, when Mariani laments no longer being able to see the “greengold grass, / glistening the bright skin of the copper beeches.” And we can hear Hopkins again, that great poet of the shining day, when Mariani describes “know[ing] that somewhere, now as then, the wind keeps whispering still”—the Holy Spirit moving and transfiguring always, even when we can’t sense it.

Mariani’s new work of criticism, The Mystery of It All, is a twilight book. Its epigraph, addressed to his wife of more than fifty years, begins, “Moon, old moon, dear moon, I beg you / answer when I call out to you.” Its final sentences read, “‘In His Will Is Our Peace.’ The very words I have etched into our gravestone.” In recent years, the eighty-year-old Mariani has been diagnosed and treated for brain cancer. This gives his epilogue, titled “On the Work Still to Be Done,” particular force.

Yet what is most striking about this book is how buoyant it is, how joyful is its account of a life of reading and writing. Hopkins, Stevens, Berryman, O’Connor: they’re all here, and Mariani attends both to their smallest formal decisions and their most expansive metaphysical concerns. “I have read and taught Stevens for over fifty years,” he remarks. “He is someone who never ceases to delight.” Great critics are able to turn the readerly delight they experience transitive: to explain it, yes, but also to pass it on to the reader. By this and many other standards, Mariani is a strong critic.

Here he is on Hopkins’s darkness: “All is unselved, untuned, and, just as violin or catgut strings go slack, all clear voweling lost, so do we, the words themselves as if swallowed, until ‘all is enormous dark / Drowned.’” And here he is on Hopkins’s sacramental, perceptual joy: “Look at the Welsh farmers with their horses in the countryside about him, breaking up the moist clods of earth: how the light shines upon them, catching the quartz glints, in an instant turning them into diamondlike shards of light—‘sheer plod’ itself doing this, allowing the plow and the sillion both to shine in God’s light.”

Even and especially in twilight, Mariani shows us the light.

The Mystery of It All Paul Mariani Paraclete Press, $25, 240 pp.

Even and especially in twilight, Mariani shows us the light.

Hopkins, who broke and remade form in almost everything he wrote, would have loved the poet Jericho Brown. The Tradition is Brown’s third collection of poetry. It’s also his best—the most interesting in form, the most wide-ranging in reference, the most daring in its wedding of the private and public, the spiritual and the sexual.

Brown has talked about reading T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” obsessively while working on this book. Eliot’s influence can be felt in this collection’s sense of tradition speaking to, and being changed by, the present. Eliot’s ghost is here. So too are the ghosts of James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, and Essex Hemphill.

Brown writes several poems in a new form he calls the duplex: a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. “Though I may not be, I do feel like a bit of a mutt in the world,” Brown has said. Queer, black, and Southern, he wanted to create a form that felt as unlikely as himself. These duplexes work by repetition and reconfiguration. Here’s a snippet:

My first love drove a burgundy car. He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

Steadfast and awful, my tall father Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

As seen here, Brown often writes about trauma: the trauma of being a hurt child or a hurt lover; the trauma of being black in America (“I promise if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me”) and the trauma of being queer in America (“My man swears his HIV is better than mine”).

But The Tradition also gives witness to joy—in sex and language, in the traditions of black art and the black church. Brown was raised Baptist, and you can hear this legacy in his imagery and music:

Forgive me, I do not wish to sing Like Tramaine Hawkins, but Lord if I could Become the note she belts halfway into The fifth minute of “The Potter’s House”

When black vocabulary heralds home- Made belief: For any kind of havoc, there is Deliverance!

That duplex I quoted from above begins and ends with the same line: “A poem is a gesture toward home.” Brown finds a temporary home, a form of deliverance, in and through tradition in its many forms.

The Tradition Jericho Brown Copper Canyon Press, $17, 110 pp.

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