The Ghost Reader

Ghost Reader is the reader unknown, the one who reads a book anonymously, who invisibly borrows it from a friend or communal library or maybe finds it in a charity box, who neither recommends nor denounces it to others. The Ghost Reader is the one whose name isn't on a library card the book was borrowed under, or an Amazon order it was purchased through, the one who doesn't send a note to the author or follow him/her on social media, the one whose thoughts about a book leave no trace.

To the writer, Ghost Reader is a phantom, a fleeting figure imagined like all those familiar literary characters that do and do not exist. Ghost Reader may have attended a book's launch, sitting at the back during the reading and saying nothing, before slipping away with the author's words forever scooped into her neural circuitry .. but s/he might on the other hand never have existed. 

Some readers send messages to authors, ask questions, write reviews, reveal their identities. Any author's glad to hear from them of course, but the best true follower, the one who really "gets" her themes and characters is the Ideal Reader who looms large in her writerly mind. Ghost Reader is the mirror image of Ghost Writer, and like that participant in the publishing world might well remain Anonymous forever.  

Woe Is They: Pronouns in the Satirocene Age

Woe Is They

       To the ever-growing list of mental ailments the contemporary mind is heir to, we can add Pronominal Phobia. This disability means that those who selves-identify as non-binary fear non-plurality of pronouns, thinking the old-fashioned grammatical ones unsafe. It's hard to address these “two-spirit” persons however, for like Schrodinger's cat they might jump either way mid-communication, declining to be pinned down to any linguistic spot they feel you might be inequitably consigning them to.

        "Oh let myselves not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven," they might cry like King Lear.

       So good-hearted inclusionists, fearing to use the wrong pro-noun about anymany, will chase after whatever handy non-nouns they can invent in a desperate attempt to anti-name the world in pursuit of equity. We must do this because we can't expect any everymany who declines binary-ness to feel unsafe just because we want to be comprehensible.

       You can't ask non-binary persons themselves about this in case it triggers their Pronominal Phobia. That much is clear to everysome, for it depends on how a person feels themself. But why, to themself, does this they-ness feel safer? It's a mystery. Don't ask me (sic). We don't know – we only know that in the face of singularity, woe is us -- and woe is they. Speaking for ourself (all my me's) we feel safest therefore inside the shelter of silence – thou too?