Hi Johannes,
>yes, I agree with Simon and probably all who read your excerpt , this is
>inspired writing!
>(I sent it on immediately to an old photographer friend who now lives in
>London, has given
>up photography but has developed a new craft, building these tiny tiny indoor
>lightweight
>airplanes that are flown to sail in the air, in caves.....). Strange stuff.
Firstly, thank you for reading Barry’s Galleon Ship Disaster and sharing it
with a friend. It means a lot, especially since this writing is less academic
and culturally critical than other texts I have written in the past. It's a
different animal, although it does come from the same spirit and social
contexts.
>I wondered about your book title, «Feral Class», and how to chose this title
>for a working
>class memoir, and how to spread the term of the working class? why you do
>think of working
>people as an underclass? or outsiders? (in 20th century Europe or the Northern
>Anglo-American
>world, progressive era, communist parties, with rich history of unions and
>collectives and
>workers solidarity movements & social programs) (you speak of "underclass, &
>those who see
>themselves as Feral, including Gypsy, Roma, Travellers and New age
>travellers"). New age
>travellers?
"Feral Class" is not an official term but a word that explains the experience
of someone from an underclass who grew up poorer than traditional working
families. Thus, outside conventional institutions, the structures supposed to
support our family - were not there. They worked against us constantly. For
example, the social services took my sister away when I was eight, and I've
never seen her again. This happened at the same time my father, Barry, was put
in prison for drug dealing and other dodgy things. If anything, we were closer
to a criminal class in the eyes of the state and local working-class families.
In another sense, it relates to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's "The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study," where they critique the
mechanisms of control in capitalist societies and advocate for a form of life
that resists top-down structures as part of a brutalized, outsider class. Also,
coming from an impoverished background meant constantly being involved in
clandestine ways of finding money, educating oneself, and not always reaching
the socially accepted label of being part of the working class. The inclusion
of being part of the Feral Class also goes beyond Gypsy, Roma, Travellers and
New age travellers; it also can include everyday criminals, street gangs,
gangsters and the homeless.
New age travellers were a Nomadic group originally from the hippy 70s, but in
the 80s and 90s, tapped into a tradition of "revolutionary utopianism in
British culture; one born of romantic longing for a pre-industrial Albion in
which the radical was fused with the rural. Initially attracting practising
neo-druids alongside the hippies, factions from the anarcho-punk scenes and
like-minded underground tribes became drawn to the Stonehenge celebration.
Similar events sprouted across the country, and those who didn’t wish to return
to their city lives started to spend summers travelling from festival to
festival in a rag-tag train of vehicles that became known as ‘the convoy’.
https://www.frieze.com/article/what-happened-to-new-age-travellers
Even though my book touches on aspects of autonomy, the autonomy here was not a
conscious decision in the political sense but a way of existing anyway. I’ve
always had an affinity with outsiders, whether gipsies, new-age travellers,
punks, activists, artists, or people without homes. It includes feeling genuine
respect and allegiance with women, the Irish, people of colour, queer culture,
transgender, and others who have and are struggling to exist in a tediously
conservative, elitist, neoliberal and imperialist colonial society.
The term working class has always been broad for me, relating to varied social
sections, conditions and theories of political organisation. The difference
between the feral and working class is that the working class has a history of
organised collective struggle around labour, building solidarity and shared
values and identity. 100s of years of critical thought and actions forging
paths for working-class empowerment. The working class is a subset of employees
compensated with wage or salary-based contracts whose exact membership varies
from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon
earnings from wage labour. Socialists define the working class as those with
nothing to sell but their labour. These people used to be referred to as the
proletariat.
Punk, post-punk, and grassroots political folk music have also helped me
understand the imaginative aspects of being part of the working and feral
classes. For instance, Graham Burnett's comprehensive book Southend on Zine
connects directly to my history as a teenager and in my early twenties in
Southend-On-Sea, and some of these reading materials are in this book. Punk’s
popular grassroots culture showed how working-class people can take control of
culture by building infrastructures for creative expression, knowledge,
production and distribution. Other influences include a focus on DIY ethos,
collaborative peer-produced software cultures of the early Web, and feminist
Post-Situationism.
>What I really like is that you address difficult issues such as our strange
>and dire family
>romances; I also remember quite a few abusive teachers and priests in my
>childhood; started
>writing a performance memoir, but began near the end, not the beginning, going
>slowly
>backwards in my repressed flash backs. Where does your book start?
It starts with a personal moment when I was lying in a critical emergency ward
in Ipswich Hospital with cancer in 2021, nearly dying. My mum had died the year
before. I was thinking about what my life meant. I would not have been able to
write this book until now. After my mum died and after I struggled with cancer.
I had to revisit my life and reconsider what was 'really' important. Did I want
to continue pushing media art and forget my own needs? The answer was no.
This book revisits my earlier life up to 1987. I am not interested in wallowing
in any form of victimhood. This writing is about sharing knowledge, wisdom,
idiocy, raw life, and hope. I survived. Welcome to a feral-class odyssey.
Wishing you well.
Marc
On Thursday, 2 January 2025 at 19:47, Johannes Birringer
<johannesbirring...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Marc
>
> yes, I agree with Simon and probably all who read your excerpt , this is
> inspired writing!
> (I sent it on immediately to an old photographer friend who now lives in
> London, has given up photography but has developed a new craft,
> building these tiny tiny indoor lightweight airplanes that are flown to sail
> in the air, in caves.....). Strange stuff.
>
> I wondered about your book title, «Feral Class», and how to chose this title
> for a working class memoir,
> and how to spread the term of the working class? why you do think of working
> people as an underclass? or outsiders?
> (in 20th century Europe or the Northern Anglo-American world, progressive
> era, communist parties, with rich history of unions and collectives and
> workers solidarity movements & social programs) (you speak of "underclass, &
> those who see themselves as Feral, including Gypsy, Roma, Travellers and New
> age travellers"). New age travellers?
>
> What I really like is that you address difficult issues such as our strange
> and dire family romances; I also remember quite a few abusive teachers and
> priests in my childhood; started writing a performance memoir, but began near
> the end, not the beginning, going slowly backwards in my repressed flash
> backs. Where does your book start?
>
> with many regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
> On Thu, Jan 2, 2025 at 12:33 PM marc.garrett via NetBehaviour
> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Simon,
>>
>> Thank you. I can't wait for it to be out there in the world. It's quite a
>> shift away from working with others on art, networks and academia etc. This
>> work is much more personal. The themes covered in the Feral Class book deal
>> with poverty in the late '60s - early '80s. It revisits personal memories
>> and experiences on child abuse, bullying fathers, racism, sex work, drugs,
>> sexuality, identity, punk and post-punk culture, education, shit jobs,
>> council estates, witchcraft, grassroots activism, and more.
>>
>> "This book is an urgent call to those from disadvantaged backgrounds who
>> have felt like trespassers in a world ruled by elites. The audience is the
>> working class, struggling parents and their children, outsiders, the
>> underclass, and those who see themselves as Feral, including Gypsy, Roma,
>> Travellers and New age travellers."
>>
>> Wishing you well.
>>
>> Marc
>>
>> On Wednesday, 1 January 2025 at 21:54, Simon Mclennan via NetBehaviour
>> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
>>
>>> This is so great!
>>> I look forward to reading the book!
>>> Simon
>>>
>>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
>>> From: Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
>>> Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2025, 02:49
>>> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Barry’s Galleon Ship Disaster
>>> To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
>>> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
>>> Cc: Alan Sondheim <sondh...@gmail.com>
>>>
>>> Love this and got me thinking about still sails in wind and turbulence,
>>> what would be an amazing nautical feat....
>>>
>>> Happier News Year, we could use that yes?
>>>
>>> On Tue, Dec 31, 2024 at 7:23 AM marc.garrett via NetBehaviour
>>> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Barry’s Galleon Ship Disaster
>>>>
>>>> Barry, my father, was a man of varied interests and very much into his
>>>> hobbies. Some of them were illegal. For instance, a few times, he was
>>>> caught exposing himself in the streets to women he fancied. He sold rugs
>>>> and was also a pyromaniac. He would often vanish for days and weeks,
>>>> either because he was in prison or away at a secretive and menacing
>>>> awayday with his black magic group. There are stories my mum told me about
>>>> him, where they’d kidnap individuals in a black transit van. But I’m not
>>>> sure if that’s true. There is so much about him that is so outlandishly
>>>> unbelievable. But, the bits of evidence I know are the events that have
>>>> materially changed my life. He was a local legend, and his reputation
>>>> overshadowed the rest of the family.
>>>>
>>>> Whenever we walked around town, it was a strange experience for me, my
>>>> younger brother, and my mum. Some people who knew about us and Barry’s
>>>> unprincipled activities would keep their distance as if we were about to
>>>> infect them with a dark, evil curse. Sometimes, it was isolating, like we
>>>> were pariahs, but at other times, there was an essence of empowerment due
>>>> to the feeling that people were afraid of us. The problem with being
>>>> marked as different, scary or dangerous is that it attracts the types of
>>>> individuals who find the notion of it exciting for them, and when you're a
>>>> young child, that’s the last thing you need.
>>>>
>>>> It was emotionally reassuring when Barry engaged his talents with less
>>>> insidious ventures. A hobby of his that also involved me now and then was
>>>> his plane-spotting exploits. He would take me to the airport to watch
>>>> planes landing and flying off. He watched it all through his binoculars
>>>> while noting the observed aircraft in his notepad. I was bored, and he was
>>>> always very excited. His fascination with planes extended to model making.
>>>> He was incredibly proud that he made his model planes from scratch, not
>>>> assembly kits. He would buy balsa wood and cut it with a craft knife to
>>>> make model aircraft. He made many different types. Some would be painfully
>>>> intricate biplanes replicating the Wright brothers’ first successful
>>>> aeroplane launched in 1903 to WW11 aircraft, which seemed less detailed
>>>> but still displayed high quality and artful technique. These were the
>>>> moments I remember as notable when he was calm and lost in his craft. He
>>>> was good at it, and you could feel how enchanted he was by the whole
>>>> experience.
>>>>
>>>> Another recreation Barry enjoyed was painting. Just like he was obsessed
>>>> with aircraft in the singular sense, he spent much of his creative time on
>>>> oil painting. His primary focus was Galleon ships, huge, multi-decked
>>>> sailing ships and armed cargo carriers from the 16th to 18th centuries.
>>>> Again, he was mesmerised by his chosen subject and spent many hours
>>>> painting different galleon scenes in sea-based settings, with large waves
>>>> crashing at the side of the vessels. It was all very dramatic. One day, I
>>>> entered the room as he painted his latest masterpiece with a slow, intense
>>>> dedication to detail. I suddenly noticed something with all the paintings.
>>>> I nervously twitched, knowing how proud he was of them.
>>>>
>>>> I wasn’t sure whether to tell him what I had spotted. But I had to. I
>>>> couldn’t help myself. I told him nervously that the ships had no wind in
>>>> their sails; they were straight, not as breezy as they should be in
>>>> turbulent winds. He stopped painting, slowly gazed at all his works, and
>>>> dropped his arm holding the paintbrush. Barry released a big sigh, and
>>>> then the room fell silent. He turned round and looked at me with a deep
>>>> hatred, and it felt like his eyes were burrowing into my skull. Then, he
>>>> flipped and smashed up all his canvases amongst other objects in the room.
>>>> Thankfully, he didn’t hit me. He may have been talented at many things,
>>>> but painting wasn’t one of them.
>>>> A section from the book Feral Class by Marc Garrett. To be published by
>>>> Minor Compositions in 2025.
>>>>
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>>>
>>> --
>>>
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>>> sondheim ut gmail.com
>>>
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