Tom and Viv is a film about T.S. Eliot (Tom) and his lover, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Tom was an earlier 20th Century writer/poet of some renown. There’s a scene in the film when Tom is thinking he’s such a failure, and Viv is trying to cheer him up by pointing out that his last book sold 700 copies... 700! That was a phenomenal number of books back then, especially books of weird poetry.
Okay, so I’ve been feeling pretty bad that I haven’t seen much coverage of Hello, Cruel World in the mainstream media. They’ve left it alone like the plague. And I’ve been feeling pretty much like a failure, which seems to be my default feeling anyway. (Which is why I wrote a freakin’ book about alternatives to suicide. We teach what we most need to learn, that’s what I’ve always heard.) Anyway, there I am feeling terrible about what a failure I am, and I start hearing from people that they can’t find any copies of the book anywhere. It’s back-ordered on Amazon. A few college bookstores have copies because I’ll be visiting their campuses and they wanted to have some in stock. But right now, the book is hard to find. It came out this past July, and it’s gone through 7,500 copies. Without any freakin’ mainstream coverage. Dang and Woo-hoo! I couldn’t be more pleased and proud to be have been covered by an underground and alternative media network of blogs, podcasts, zines, public radio, pirate radio, internet radio, some cool porn sites, and even a few respectable far left political websites... they all liked the book and said so.
The result of all those people saying how much they like the book is that it’s going to be difficult to find for a while until Seven Stories Press can get a reprint done. That’s not as easy as it sounds, because it involves not only big cash on hand, but also a place to store all the books newly printed. But as orders keep coming in for the book (and they are!) that means Seven Stories can ship more books, and they’ll have room enough to store the rest.
All that to say, I’m sorry there isn’t a book if you need or want one for yourself or a friend. There will be a second edition coming out as soon as we can possibly make that happen.
In the meantime, there’s something you can listen to that might make life more worth living for you for a while. It’s a talk I recently gave at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, Virginia, USA. Indymedia Richmond kindly taped the whole darned thing (one hour and five minutes), and you can listen to it for FREE!!! How about that? So, click here to listen to “Dangerous Dreams and Damned Desires.” It’s the performance version of one of the chapters in Hello, Cruel World... the chapter called “Hello, Cruel Desire.” So, until the book becomes available again (and even after it is), you still have a cool piece of it to listen to.
And don’t forget to check the Goodies tab on this website to download your free copy of Hello, Cruel World Lite... that should help ya stay alive until we can get a new printing out.
Love you lots, and I’m really sorry that the book might be hard to find for a while.
xoxo
Kate
Saturday, March 10, 2007
