The General

I have a new book out...

The General is a follow-up to my book Proceedings (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2021) which was a pandemic work about carrying on in shifting times. Get it here:

https://www.erratumpress.com/the-general

I was gathering fragments of this for over a year, from late 2024, using the speak-to-text function on an iPhone, usually while pushing the pram.

I stop briefly to speak into the iPhone, unless the little one is wailing and needs me to keep pushing, so that she can go to sleep. The ‘blurb’ reflects this method, if I might be so pompous as to call it a method.

I’ve been incubating another very big piece of work for many years, but at the moment I’m perambulatory rather than peripatetic and I’m putting the ‘ramble’ back into perambulation.

So The General provides further notes towards the big thing as well. In some ways, my problem is not starting writing, my problem is that I can’t stop doing it. If I could stop writing completely, I probably would, but I can’t. Some people would kill for this problem, but my conundrum is that I no longer have time to write. I could split off into ten people and still not get enough done.

The General is FAST.

The General was initially inspired by Keith Kahn-Harris’s question on X in November 2024: ‘What will you do with the final weekend of the Before?’ This rhetorical query indicated the inevitability of a Trump win and the global pivot which would follow.

And then… well, it followed.

The painter Dick Chappell then showed me a work called Universal Figurehead which I thought of as ‘The General.’ At this point I began writing on the concept of ‘General’ as ‘highest in rank’, ‘chief’ and ‘the general’ as in the everyday, affecting all or most people, places or things.

I tried to write in the spirit of Halsey-Corcoran’s Winterreissen and Robert Sheppard’s Twentieth Century Blues and related texts.

The General also tracks a move out of the city: fragments of a life flash before the eyes, in the last days of the before.

At the centre of 2025 is a room and in the room a trap door and inside the trapdoor a lie. The room is the general and The General is in the room.

We all need to keep pushing so that we can sleep, don’t we?

And so despite bad times I’m thrilled to see this book coming out via the wonderful Erratum Press, who are a joy to work with. A cathartic blast from behind the pram, a speak-to-text hexing of the pretend gods currently strutting around the debating chambers. Get yourself one, take its ride, feel a tiny bit better.

I will post excerpts, readings and related things here later.