HOW TO AVOID A TRAP; or, ON MARTYRDOM/TRUE HERESY

the phil wood whose obituary ran at sfgate.com today had no apparent affiliation with phil wood & co., american manufacturer of fine cycling components, which will surely be no small source of confusion considering that the recently deceased founded a publishing house in berkeley called ten speed press in 1971, the same year that phil wood & co. was founded in nearby san jose. wood's first publication was titled anybody's bike book.

watch out, other bicycle riding book world wonks. it's easy to jump to conclusions. phil wood is also apparently the name of the new zealander with the record in the triple jump, and he'll likely pop up as a red herring on some site or another. the road is fraught with shad. don't get tripped up.

and where was bikesnobnyc on making this important public service announcement? after all, his seal of disapproval marks the very center of the complicated venn diagram that contrasts cycling and publishing across the internet. it would seem, however, that concern for the public good ends where the meetings with the literary agents begin. holiday sales must be good.

in other proliferations of confusion and deceit, on friday the new york times published a review of how to live ("or a life of montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer") along with a profile of its author, sarah bakewell. the review, in an echo of this much earlier one by laura miller, posits the subject of how to live, michel de montaigne, as the creator of the personal essay and, by extension, as the "father of all bloggers" (that one's in the title). we've already offended jonathan franzen, so we needn't tread lightly to avoid breaking with canon by decrying the reputation of montaigne. unfortunately, i can't insist that this particular oversight is the fault of a poor translations market, because montaigne has been translated from french, and essays in idleness has been translated from the japanese. montaigne was almost certainly translated first, but yoshida kenkō was spearheading the popularization of the personal essay more than two-hundred years before montaigne.

granted, essays in idleness is as canonical within the history of japanese literature as any other work, but i can give up on railing against the useless artifice of seminality for the moment and satisfy myself with crying euro-centrism just to be able to wonder again why no one can accept that the japanese invented blogging. no shade on montaigne.

sleep easy, phil wood.