File this under “no such thing as coincidence.”

The very same day I posted yesterday’s post on a type of journal entry, Vox Day began ruthlessly examining postmodern literature. Essentially, the argument is that postmodern literature is void of information content or actual communication; instead, the writing is meant to be skimmed for an impression.

This holds true to what I know of modern MFA-style workshops in creative writing. They despise “genre fiction,” which tends to focus on such quaint, old-fashioned ideas like story and character, while being absolutely obsessed with sentence-level stylistics. If you never look past the WORDS to the MEANING, however, you don’t get a good story. (Hence why you never see any good stories coming out of MFA-style workshops.)

This can also apply to journals and diaries.

If I go back to my longhand journals, I can re-read entries and remember what was going on in my life at the time. There’s usually some sort of structure to what I wrote, and it reflected what was in my head. There’s content being communicated. And even though it’s to-myself from-myself, I can understand past entries even with the passage of time.

Now, the Keel’s Simple Diary, I don’t think I’ve ever gone through and re-read past entries.

[Press pause while I do so.]

Based our previous observation of words and content, I can validate the conclusion that you probably just leapt to that Keel’s postmodern approach to journaling does very little to retain the content of a day. Even in the entries that I specifically mentioned events, I have no idea what was going on. Nothing evokes a memory.

It’s fun to fill out, to make your brain stretch a little bit to fill in the random types of questions that are asked for each day, but because the questions are so random, there’s no comparison across time, or even space for a narrative or even just a data point or two.

You validate the action of updating a daily journal, but the purpose (to provide a document for daily life, thoughts, emotions, etc.) is completely obliterated.

Postmodernism strikes again.