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My Bio, Kinda | Aug 08 2000

I was asked to write a brief bio of myself to help publicize a reading. I didn’t want to write it at first – such things have always irked me – but then decided to have some fun with it. Which is what I did, I had some fun with it.

In 1991 Michael Barrish attempted to ride a bicycle to all the towns in the United States named Freedom, Liberty, or Justice; he has not ridden a bicycle since. A freelance web developer, he has worked as director of a national college scholarship program, a personal care attendant, a professional blackjack player, a fruit vendor, a film projectionist, a golf caddie, manager of a cooperative supermarket, caretaker of a bed and breakfast, and a bingo caller. At all times he carries a list of the forty-two houses and apartments he has lived in since childhood. Michael currently resides in Brooklyn and is writing a novel about a man who suspects himself of stealing his girlfriend’s bras.

Reading this again, I’m not entirely sure who this Michael Barrish person is. Is he an itinerant pervert? A post-modern anti-hero? A random demographic sampling? More importantly, how did he get the same idea for a novel as me?

I kid, but still it’s unsettling to read a bio of yourself, one that you yourself wrote, and to feel that you don’t know that person. Would my friends know that person? Would my mother?

Well, yes, they all would, but only because they already know me. Which is to say that they would recognize certain facts about me (the bingo calling, for instance) and go from there, conjuring the person they know. A stranger, on the other hand, would be forced to rely on the largely irrelevant things I say about myself.

This reminds me of a story. On a train Picasso met a man who announced with some disgust that Picasso’s paintings didn’t look anything like real people. Picasso asked the man to show him something that did look like a real person, and the man pulled out a photograph of his wife. Picasso studied the photograph for a moment and said, “She’s awfully small, isn’t she?”

This reminds me of something else. When I was trying to come up with a name for this website, I considered calling it “variouslies.” In this I was partly inspired by a quote from Milan Kundera: “On the surface, the intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”

Bios and the like are intelligible lies. This explains why they irk me: I’m more interested in the unintelligible truth. Which is why I prefer fiction.

This reminds me of another quote, this time from the poet Muriel Rukeyser: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

Think what you will, but I take this statement quite seriously and consider it an important epistomological insight. Maybe I should even put it in my bio somewhere: “Michael Barrish believes that the universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

Whoever Michael Barrish is.