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The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir
Anna Joy Springer was lead singer and songwriter for the influential punk band Blatz that came out of The 924 Gilman Street Project and Lookout! Records, alongside bands like The Yeastie Girlz and Green Day. She later sang with The Gr'ups and Cypher in the Snow, and toured with Sister Spit, a raucous all-woman group of writers headed by Michelle Tea.
The Vicious Red Relic, Love, re-enacts Springer's relationship with [Gil], a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she'd tested positive for HIV. Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.
The Vicious Red Relic, Love, re-enacts Springer's relationship with [Gil], a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she'd tested positive for HIV. Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 2011
14 people are currently reading
635 people want to read
About the author
Anna Joy Springer
7 books73 followersAnna Joy Springer was a punk singer in the early 90's Bay Area punk and homocore scenes (Blatz, The Gr'ups, and Cypher in the Snow.) She toured with Sister Spit in 1999 and 2000. She now teaches writing at UC San Diego where she also directs the MFA program in Writing.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 20, 2012
I've been planning this massively insightful review of The Vicious Red Relic, Love for GoodReads and every other site but I'm going to have to take it a step at a time because Red Relic gave me Standhal Syndrome AND Stendhal Syndrome. I didn't know about Standhal until just now, it's like Stendhal, except instead of being made faint by beauty you have a small aneurysm from it. A wee geyser, technically known to us in the medical profession as A Relic-of-Beauty Brain-Mist. It's actually quite refreshing to your frontal lobes.
Point #1: It took me six weeks--SIX FUCKING WEEKS--to get past the beauty of The Forest of Tangential Literacies. I'm talking the phrase. And then each motherfucking PARAGRAPH. And THEN how Anna Joy structured the whole thing--I can't believe that this much embodied (cuz "writing is the body" (taunted in snotty Valley Girl voice) ) beauty (is there a fucking synonym for beauty I wonder? Who can know. No one, sadly. It's really sad. Other sad things include--) But I digress. What? The book's structure is astonishing, how it folds in, opens out, spirals, wefts and warps in crazy sexy rhythm sentencings (I'm coining that right now, I want the right to enrage just like the person from hell who made up "Pleasuring"--most Evil Word In World; My students went insane over this book. They're young and old and in-between and smart, interesting writers, so I took the first few pages of Red Relic, made up some random copycat structure assignment on the spot, and each student wrote a "book in a week," complete with graphics and photos and crazy emails etc, after which everyone felt released at least temporarily from the humorless terrorizing authorized Prisonhouse of Language. The only problem was no one wanted to use any other book but Red Relic for the assignments.
These are boring obvservations that don't address the sheer multidimensional pleasures of this book; linger, race through, go back, it doesn't matter. Why? Cliffhanger! To be continued but everyone should have this one their bookshelf. There's nothing like it; it's brilliant, gorgeous, AND deeply pleasurable. Not punitive or smug in the slightest. A luminous object created from within the deepest, darkest, space of the unknown, terror, and invisible alchemy. This is too abstract to be helpful but Whatever. It's installment #1. Warmup.
Point #1: It took me six weeks--SIX FUCKING WEEKS--to get past the beauty of The Forest of Tangential Literacies. I'm talking the phrase. And then each motherfucking PARAGRAPH. And THEN how Anna Joy structured the whole thing--I can't believe that this much embodied (cuz "writing is the body" (taunted in snotty Valley Girl voice) ) beauty (is there a fucking synonym for beauty I wonder? Who can know. No one, sadly. It's really sad. Other sad things include--) But I digress. What? The book's structure is astonishing, how it folds in, opens out, spirals, wefts and warps in crazy sexy rhythm sentencings (I'm coining that right now, I want the right to enrage just like the person from hell who made up "Pleasuring"--most Evil Word In World; My students went insane over this book. They're young and old and in-between and smart, interesting writers, so I took the first few pages of Red Relic, made up some random copycat structure assignment on the spot, and each student wrote a "book in a week," complete with graphics and photos and crazy emails etc, after which everyone felt released at least temporarily from the humorless terrorizing authorized Prisonhouse of Language. The only problem was no one wanted to use any other book but Red Relic for the assignments.
These are boring obvservations that don't address the sheer multidimensional pleasures of this book; linger, race through, go back, it doesn't matter. Why? Cliffhanger! To be continued but everyone should have this one their bookshelf. There's nothing like it; it's brilliant, gorgeous, AND deeply pleasurable. Not punitive or smug in the slightest. A luminous object created from within the deepest, darkest, space of the unknown, terror, and invisible alchemy. This is too abstract to be helpful but Whatever. It's installment #1. Warmup.
September 29, 2017
Interviews and Reviews:
9/26/2017 - "In her “fabulist memoir,” Springer uses text and image, re-imagined myth, deep sexual desire, and an imaginary friend made of tin foil to lead readers into a world where interpersonal ethics supersede tired, patriarchal social norms and death has no dominion."
-Ariel Gore
http://lithub.com/10-magical-feminist...
If you don’t like to “over-think” things, skip this book. But if you think life is complicated, difficult, and weird—and you love women who fit that description, too—this book is for you. -Aaron Cometbus
From Brooke Wonders at American Book Review: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american...
From Tt Jax at lambda literary foundation.
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/feature...
from j/j hastain at The Lit Pub:
http://thelitpub.com/ajs%E2%80%99s-wo...
from Steve Hart and Razorcake:
http://www.razorcake.org/punk-book-re...
from Melissa Chadburn at The Collagist:
http://www.dzancbooks.org/the-collagi...
Sassafrass Lowrey at LAMBDA:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews...
Manvi Singh - http://manvistravels.wordpress.com/20...
9/26/2017 - "In her “fabulist memoir,” Springer uses text and image, re-imagined myth, deep sexual desire, and an imaginary friend made of tin foil to lead readers into a world where interpersonal ethics supersede tired, patriarchal social norms and death has no dominion."
-Ariel Gore
http://lithub.com/10-magical-feminist...
If you don’t like to “over-think” things, skip this book. But if you think life is complicated, difficult, and weird—and you love women who fit that description, too—this book is for you. -Aaron Cometbus
From Brooke Wonders at American Book Review: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american...
From Tt Jax at lambda literary foundation.
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/feature...
from j/j hastain at The Lit Pub:
http://thelitpub.com/ajs%E2%80%99s-wo...
from Steve Hart and Razorcake:
http://www.razorcake.org/punk-book-re...
from Melissa Chadburn at The Collagist:
http://www.dzancbooks.org/the-collagi...
Sassafrass Lowrey at LAMBDA:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews...
Manvi Singh - http://manvistravels.wordpress.com/20...
November 27, 2012
In Anna Joy Springer's The Vicious Red Relic, Love, narrator Nina writes back to the past, with a time machine, Winky (or Blinky), fashioned out of tin foil, instructed in the ways of the world she once inhabited with Gil, her badass and troubled lover, whose death remains an open wound, emotional and psychic. Like the myths of the virile goddess Inanna and dazzling egoist Gilgamesh, whose tales wrap themselves around Nina's as only problematic literary ancestry can.
The Vicious Red Relic, Love is an incredible book because it is more than just one book. It operates on several levels at once: as illustrated memoir of AIDS, love and loss; as punk epistolary bildungsroman, as a primer in narratology and mythmaking. In another's hands, so much material would be unwieldy, confusing, but Springer's attentiveness to structure—letters, metaforests, myths, coursework ephemera and cult propaganda—are sequenced deceptively simple intention. Her (both Springer's and Nina's) immersion in the recursive and discursive nature of writing, and just plain honesty allows most any reader to enter this book and not only be met where they are, but be enticed to trust, to step through the holes of story and into the dark. And this book does have darkness, in the sumptuous prose and ragged humor, in the wish the writing itself aims to fulfill. Just what is writing good for? How do we come to see the differences between acquiring knowledge and the getting of wisdom? What can be healed or saved from it all? I love how this book yields no easy answers, perhaps no answers at all, but instead just lets the art of the attempt lay itself out.
I taught this book in an MFA writing class Fall 2012, and marveled at the ways in which students approached the book: what they desired of it but couldn't quite reach, what they could easily have of it, aspects they wanted to avoid—so much like life, all the ambient violence and vibrant questioning coexisting in the text, affecting one's senses directly and subliminally at once. I love how The Vicious Red Relic, Love not only functions on so many different levels of genre and meaning, but also how it performs multiple modes of self-actualization for writers, for women, for queers, for humans, full-grown and forever flawed.
It's an incredible book.
The Vicious Red Relic, Love is an incredible book because it is more than just one book. It operates on several levels at once: as illustrated memoir of AIDS, love and loss; as punk epistolary bildungsroman, as a primer in narratology and mythmaking. In another's hands, so much material would be unwieldy, confusing, but Springer's attentiveness to structure—letters, metaforests, myths, coursework ephemera and cult propaganda—are sequenced deceptively simple intention. Her (both Springer's and Nina's) immersion in the recursive and discursive nature of writing, and just plain honesty allows most any reader to enter this book and not only be met where they are, but be enticed to trust, to step through the holes of story and into the dark. And this book does have darkness, in the sumptuous prose and ragged humor, in the wish the writing itself aims to fulfill. Just what is writing good for? How do we come to see the differences between acquiring knowledge and the getting of wisdom? What can be healed or saved from it all? I love how this book yields no easy answers, perhaps no answers at all, but instead just lets the art of the attempt lay itself out.
I taught this book in an MFA writing class Fall 2012, and marveled at the ways in which students approached the book: what they desired of it but couldn't quite reach, what they could easily have of it, aspects they wanted to avoid—so much like life, all the ambient violence and vibrant questioning coexisting in the text, affecting one's senses directly and subliminally at once. I love how The Vicious Red Relic, Love not only functions on so many different levels of genre and meaning, but also how it performs multiple modes of self-actualization for writers, for women, for queers, for humans, full-grown and forever flawed.
It's an incredible book.
December 7, 2011
I AM READING THIS NOW!
edit:
I HAVE FINISHED READING THIS! had to take a break because it was too emotionally intense to absorb while stressing about other stuff the past months.
there's so much to this book, it is difficult to draw lines around. it is a grief narrative, it is a retelling of the epic of gilgamesh, it is a memoir, it is a revision, a love story, a collage, a meditation on meaning and uncertainty. an excerpt:
“Sex had started feeling like being lonely in a crowd of drunks, then pissed on from a balcony. And even that was an accident…
But then I found [Gil]. After we kissed- her mouth pulling my lips like they were nipples – after she pushed me open so wide I bled a smeary ring around her wrist, after I hiccuped sobs and dug trails in the paint on her wall and slammed my fists down against her back, and after I felt like a muscular black-winged horse had flown out from between my thighs then burst open like a star, after she held my shuddering, transformed body, she told me I was hers.”
and:
"The ones who know the great sorrow of death are the ones who remain alive to mourn. Grief is all the living know of death. And grief, let me tell you, is unbearable. It never fully passes. When someone we love dies, the one we had become in relation to them also dies, but we're forced to stay alive with this dead part inside."
--
gina abelkop's review is much more insightful than mine: http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/the-vici... .
edit:
I HAVE FINISHED READING THIS! had to take a break because it was too emotionally intense to absorb while stressing about other stuff the past months.
there's so much to this book, it is difficult to draw lines around. it is a grief narrative, it is a retelling of the epic of gilgamesh, it is a memoir, it is a revision, a love story, a collage, a meditation on meaning and uncertainty. an excerpt:
“Sex had started feeling like being lonely in a crowd of drunks, then pissed on from a balcony. And even that was an accident…
But then I found [Gil]. After we kissed- her mouth pulling my lips like they were nipples – after she pushed me open so wide I bled a smeary ring around her wrist, after I hiccuped sobs and dug trails in the paint on her wall and slammed my fists down against her back, and after I felt like a muscular black-winged horse had flown out from between my thighs then burst open like a star, after she held my shuddering, transformed body, she told me I was hers.”
and:
"The ones who know the great sorrow of death are the ones who remain alive to mourn. Grief is all the living know of death. And grief, let me tell you, is unbearable. It never fully passes. When someone we love dies, the one we had become in relation to them also dies, but we're forced to stay alive with this dead part inside."
--
gina abelkop's review is much more insightful than mine: http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/the-vici... .
December 28, 2012
But enough about me and more about the book. Read it. It's probably the greatest thing I've read all year. If I ever get the chance to teach Gilgamesh again, I'm teaching parts of this book alongside it. There's just so much to say about this book, I can't do it all. The feminist re-telling of Gilgamesh, the story of Ishtar/Inanna. (Once, at work, a co-worker said to me "You're a goddess." I had done some small thing for her. I said, without even thinking, "I will be Ishtar.") What makes it feminist is that it deals with more than actions, and silence, it imagines emotion, suffering, companionship, hints at an intimacy that goes beyond the buddy-film model. And the descent of Inanna into the underworld is magnificent. The fable world of the forest, from which the familiar appears, is so hopeful it hurts. It is the world we all wish we could find. But made strange with longing and reality and memory, it becomes a scary unintelligible place. Synopology, the fake cult, is a brilliant stand-in for Scientology (which is just how I read it, but definitely not the only reading). The typewritten pages of epistolary diary-entry/instruction is absolutely the perfect mode for the kind of reflection that doesn't lead to remorse or revelation, which is the only kind of reflection that matters. The kind of reflection that leads to acceptance, with or without understanding.
[Read the whole review: http://alluringlyshort.com/2013/01/08... ]
[Read the whole review: http://alluringlyshort.com/2013/01/08... ]
May 14, 2014
A review which is really more like me writing a gushing love letter about this book. Because a review would be all objective and critical, and this isn’t. This is just me telling the world that this book is everything. It made me cry, and if something can get me to tears I know I love it. This book, this book. It’s a myth, a fable, a diary, a scrapbook, a love letter, a memoir, maybe. It talks a lot about the nature of truth vs. lies and fact vs. fiction, which is something I think about so often. And I want to quote every line; write them on the walls. Some of it is so like my life. Some of it is nothing like my life at all, but it made me feel that I had lived it. I just. Read it, okay?
September 21, 2012
this book deserves way more stars--it's that startling and sophisticated and powerful. not only did i love all the eyes of the hybrid form, i loved how well it served this difficult story: of a femme woman grieving her butch lover and traveling back in time, via proxies, to get at what happened and how and why. epic, poetry, drawings, short shorts; the text uses them all like counterpoints, like reading instructions, like cracks into the core of the characters. not only this but who's writing about the female body and queer desire and raw, mysterious grief with such honesty and compassion? & who's doing this while challenging the broader culture--which teaches women to suppress their desires, to hate themselves, to endorse misogynist structures--on the ways it impedes this body-desire-grief? on the ways it throws up official narratives that get certain love stories and dying stories wrong? but maybe what's dearest to me about this text, other than its formal beauty, is its critical function . . . this kind of audacious art is so badly needed for women, not just to offer up voice or medicine (though those are priorities too). but to embody how in content as well as form, we are complex and "kali" and ready, already more than just discursive/physical objects in some straight male bildungsroman, so long as the culture can hear us and catch up.
July 1, 2012
You really have to do at least three readings of this book. The first pass is to have your head whipped by Springer's magic words, with each sitting. The next is to explore the play of image, history, memory, and those moments where fiction doesn't care about the facts, and vice-versa.
You can do a third, fourth and fifth reading, just by following the typeface, or Springer's illustrations. Each experience is different, varied, even as the reader already knows from the outset how and where the story ends.
Highly recommended reading for anyone who has loved and lost, whose hearts grow fonder with irreversible absence, and other burnt-out forms of impermanence.
You can do a third, fourth and fifth reading, just by following the typeface, or Springer's illustrations. Each experience is different, varied, even as the reader already knows from the outset how and where the story ends.
Highly recommended reading for anyone who has loved and lost, whose hearts grow fonder with irreversible absence, and other burnt-out forms of impermanence.
August 29, 2012
Why can't I put six stars?
This is the most profound, beautiful, unpretentious and courageous book I think I have ever read. The way Anna Joy Springer melds the worlds of mythology, imagination, fiction, and memoir together is unlike anything else I've ever read. This book can be uncomfortably honest, hilarious, or deeply reflective (sometimes all at once). If you enjoy uncanny writing that is not created in a prescribed genre of "experimental writing" this is for you.
Really there is no way to review this book because it creates an experience, it breaks language in a way that is no exercise in theoretical writing styles, but a genuine examination of self.
This is the most profound, beautiful, unpretentious and courageous book I think I have ever read. The way Anna Joy Springer melds the worlds of mythology, imagination, fiction, and memoir together is unlike anything else I've ever read. This book can be uncomfortably honest, hilarious, or deeply reflective (sometimes all at once). If you enjoy uncanny writing that is not created in a prescribed genre of "experimental writing" this is for you.
Really there is no way to review this book because it creates an experience, it breaks language in a way that is no exercise in theoretical writing styles, but a genuine examination of self.
August 25, 2012
The most courageous, intelligent, and inspiring book I've ever read. It hits home for me in so many ways: MPD aka DID, punk, feminism, nature, mythology, magic, and imagination. The way the narrative structure creates comes together is brilliant--I won't say anymore, you just have to find out for yourself.
For my friends who may be "triggered" easily, this is truly an inspiring read, but do proceed with caution--the honesty and subjects covered in this book are intense and may be difficult.
For my friends who may be "triggered" easily, this is truly an inspiring read, but do proceed with caution--the honesty and subjects covered in this book are intense and may be difficult.
September 30, 2015
AJS is a professor where I went to undergrad; I never had a class with her (which is super weird, because the department is tiny), but all of us who did a senior honors thesis received the very kind gift of this book upon completion.
Want to read
February 20, 2012megan rec.
February 11, 2012
this is quite possibly my favorite book of all time; read my review here: http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/the-vici...
and then read this book, over and over and over again.
and then read this book, over and over and over again.
February 3, 2013
I wish Anna Joy Springer could write and edit my dream states.
August 1, 2013
Everything written in this book is true.
Want to read
April 16, 2023Just realized that my inspiringly unhinged, queer icon of a professor wrote this. Brb, procuring a copy immediately.
February 1, 2021
I don't think anything I can say about this book will prepare you to read it. It changes as it unfolds. What I will say is that it's one of the most elegant and moving deployments of the erotic that I've ever read. Tapping into gentle and volatile aspects of memory, it draws you in and holds you until it's over, formalizing love and betrayal and loss and nostalgia, the whole lifespan of a relationship, through its shifting lenses of myth and diary.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews