Reading Philip Traylen's Diary

Dear Republic,

It’s Self-Referential Week at The Republic of Letters — LitStack celebrating itself. And what would Self-Referential Week on LitStack be without a review of Philip Traylen’s diary?

• ROL

READING PHILIP TRAYLEN’S DIARY

Several months ago, I was largely unfamiliar with, discovering him through one of my fellow writers, another Englishman. After cold-emailing Traylen out of morbid curiosity to offer my services as a beta reader for either of his upcoming books: one, a collection of poetry, the other, a diary, he kindly sent me a copy of the latter, thus beginning the correspondence that would one day lead to this piece: a review.

It feels almost sacrilegious to “review” a diary, something that should be an honest dumping ground for one’s stream of consciousness and innermost thoughts. But this stands apart from the diaries you may have been familiar with in secondary school, with heart-shaped padlocks and sticker-ridden covers. It is a work of art, an exercise in language, and a rare opportunity to spectate Traylen’s dialogue with himself. It nearly gives the reader a chance to understand him — nearly.

Reading a diary is voyeuristic in nature. We exist as an onlooker peeking out from the wings, our gaze falling upon a one-man show onstage. As readers, we are spectators, attempting to grasp the inner workings of the writer’s mind. Published or not, it is an exploration into the self, a vulnerable display of dissecting your mind and exposing what’s inside.

“A diary should be about everything except the person writing it,”(cite p.1) or so says Traylen in the first entry, concisely summing up what the rest of the book will consist of. Spanning the course of the past three years, these entries consist of everything from snippets of Traylen’s life to meta analyses and aphorisms on the function and form of language.

Traylen is famed for his surrealist writing, absurd, dry humor, excessive fondness for the Oxford comma, and frequent allusions to literatu…