mercenary

mrsner/
adjective
derogatory
adjective: mercenary
1. 1.
(of a person or their behavior) primarily concerned with making money at the expense of
ethics.
"she's nothing but a mercenary little gold digger"
synonyms
:
money-
oriented, grasping, greedy, acquisitive, avaricious, covetous,bribable, venal, materialis
tic;
informalmoney-grubbing
"mercenary self-interest"
noun
noun: mercenary; plural noun: mercenaries
1. 1.
a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army.
synonyms: soldier of fortune, professional soldier, hired soldier, gunman; More
o a person primarily concerned with material reward at the expense of ethics.
"the sport's most infamous mercenary"
synonyms: hired, paid, bought, professional
"mercenary soldiers"
Origin

late Middle English (as a noun): from Latin mercenarius hireling, from merces, merced-
reward.


Be knocked out of ones glum humdrum
What ensues is a journey of mythic proportions, during which Milo encounters countless odd characters who
are anything but dull.
Norton Juster received (and continues to receive) enormous praise for this original, witty, and oftentimes
hilarious novel, first published in 1961. In an introductory "Appreciation" written by Maurice Sendak for the
35th anniversary edition, he states, "The Phantom Tollbooth leaps, soars, and abounds in right notes all
over the place, as any proper masterpiece must." Indeed.
As Milo heads toward Dictionopolis he meets with the Whether Man ("for after all it's more important to
know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be"), passes through The Doldrums
(populated by Lethargarians), and picks up a watchdog named Tock (who has a giant alarm clock for a body).
The brilliant satire and double entendre intensifies in the Word Market, where after a brief scuffle with Officer
Short Shrift, Milo and Tock set off toward the Mountains of Ignorance to rescue the twin Princesses, Rhyme
and Reason. Anyone with an appreciation for language, irony, or Alice in Wonderland-style adventure will
adore this book for years on end. (Ages 8 and up)
a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for the world, arguably the earliest form of standardized information design, and
a relentless source of visual creativity.

9 Books on Reading and Writing
Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the
osmosis of trash and treasure.
- Hardly anything does ones mental, spiritual, and creative health more good than resolving to read more and write
better. Todays reading list addresses these parallel aspirations. And since the number of books written about reading
and writing likely far exceeds the reading capacity of a single human lifetime, this omnibus couldnt be shouldnt be
an exhaustive list. It is, instead, a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your relationship with the
written word, from whichever side of the equation you approach it.
THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE
If anyone can make grammar fun, its Maira Kalman The Elements of Style Illustrated marries
Kalmans signature whimsy with Strunk and Whites indispensable style guide to create an instant
classic. The original Elements of Style was published in 1919 in-house at Cornell University for
teaching use and reprinted in 1959 to become cultural canon, and Kalmans inimitable version is
one of our 10 favorite masterpieces of graphic nonfiction.


On a related omissible note, let the Elements of Style Rap make your day.
BIRD BY BIRD
Anne Lamott might be best known as a nonfiction writer, but Bird by Bird: Some
Instructions on Writing and Life affirms her as a formidable modern philosopher as well.
The 1994 classic is as much a practical guide to the writers life as it is a profound wisdom-
trove on the life of the heart and mind, with insight on everything from overcoming self-
doubt to navigating the osmotic balance of intuition and rationality.
On the itch of writing, Lamott banters:
We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share
this longing, which is one reason why they write so little. But we do. We have so much we want to say
and figure out.
And on the grit that commits mind to paper, she counsels:
You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve
moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a
matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.
On why we read and write:
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us
shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are
given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. Its like singing on a
boat during a terrible storm at sea. You cant stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that
ship.
ON WRITING
Hailed as one of the most successful writers alive, Stephen King has hundreds
of books under his belt, most of which bestsellers. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is
part master-blueprint, part memoir, part meditation on the writers life, filtered
through the lens of his near-fatal car crash and the newfound understanding of living it
precipitated. Though some have voiced skepticism regarding the capacity of a popular
writer to be taken seriously as an oracle of good writing, Roger Ebert put itbest: After
finding that his book On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the
craft than any book since Strunk and Whites The Elements of Style, I have gotten over my
own snobbery.
A few favorites from the book follow.
On open-endedness:
Description begins in the writers imagination, but should finish in the readers.
On feedback:
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
On the lifeblood of writing:
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isnt in the middle of
the room. Life isnt a support system for art. Its the other way around.
On the relationship between reading and writing, which I wholeheartedly second:
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you dont have time to read, you dont have the time (or the
tools) to write. Simple as that.
ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING
In Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You, Ray Bradbury
acclaimed author, dystopian novelist, hater of symbolism shares not only his wisdom
and experience in writing, but also his contagious excitement for the craft. Blending practical how-tos on everything
from finding your voice to negotiating with editors with snippets and glimpses of the authors own career, the book is
at once a manual and a manifesto, imbued with equal parts insight and enthusiasm.
On the key to creativity (cue in Elizabeth GilbertsTED talk):
Thats the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
On what to read:
In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
On art and truth:
We have our Arts so we wont die of Truth.
On signal and noise, with an embedded message that you are a mashup of what you let into your life:
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.
THE WAR OF ART
Steven Pressfield is a prolific champion of the creative process, with all its trials and
tribulations, best-known for The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your
Inner Creative Battles a personal defense system of sorts against our greatest
forms of resistance. Resistance with a capital R, that is.
Are you paralyzed with fear? Thats a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator.
Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work
or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates the strength of Resistance. Therefore,
the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is
important to us and to the growth of our soul.
Also of note: Pressfields recent companion guide to the text, Do The Work, one of our 5
favorite manifestos for the creative life.
ADVICE TO WRITERS
Advice to Writers is a compendium of quotes, anecdotes, and writerly wisdom from a
dazzling array of literary lights, originally published in 1999. From how to find a good
agent to what makes characters compelling, it spans the entire spectrum of the aspirational and the utilitarian,
covering grammar, genres, material, money, plot, plagiarism, and, of course, encouragement.
Here are a few favorites:
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance. ~ Ralph
Waldo Emerson
Dont ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out. ~ Charles Bukowski
Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry. ~ Muriel Rukeyser
Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created nothing. ~ F. Scott
Fitzgerald
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. ~ Saul Bellow
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. ~ T. S. Eliot
Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie. ~Stephen King
Good fiction is made of what is real, and reality is difficult to come by. ~ Ralph Ellison
Listen, then make up your own mind. ~ Gay Talese
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language,
which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Write without pay until somebody offers pay; if nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for. ~ Mark Twain
Originally featured, with more quotes, last December.
HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE
Humbly titled yet incredibly ambitious, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read
One by Stanley Fish isnt merely a prescriptive guide to the craft of writing its also a
rich and layered exploration of language as an evolving cultural organism. It belongs not
on the shelf of your home library but in your brains most deep-seated amphibian
sensemaking underbelly an insightful, rigorous manual on the art of language that may just be one of
the best such tools since The Elements of Style.
In fact, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal of some of the cultish mandates of Strunk and Whites bible, most
notably the blind insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. To argue his case, he picks apart some of
historys most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary
forensics to excavate the essence of beautiful language. As Adam Haslett eloquently observes in his
excellent FTreview:
[Pared-down prose] is a real loss, not because we necessarily need more Jamesian novels but because too often the instruction
to omit needless words (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a
problem.
To dissect the Tetris-like quality of words, Fish examines the following Anthony Burgess sentence from his 1968
novel Enderby Outside:
And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.
Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere. Once the words are nested in the places
ordained for them ordained is a wonderful word that points to the inexorable logic of syntactic structures they are tied by ligatures of
relationships to one another. They are subjects or objects or actions or descriptives or indications of manner, and as such they combine into a
statement about the world, that is, into a meaning that one can contemplate, admire, reject, or refine.
Originally featured here last January.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY ON WRITING
Ernest Hemingway famously maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing. Yet,
over the course of his career, he frequently wrote about writing in his novels and short
stories, his letters to editors, friends, critics, and lovers, in interviews, and even in
articles specifically commissioned on the subject. In Ernest Hemingway on Writing,
editorLarry W. Phillips culls the finest, wittiest, most profound of Hemingways reflections on writing, the
nature of the writer, and the elements of the writers life. The slender volume packs insights on everything
from work habits to mood management to discipline to knowing what to leave out, delivered with
Hemingways unmistakable personality and his signature zeal for integrity.
On what makes a great book:
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel
that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the
people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
On symbolism:
There isnt any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no
better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
(Cue in other famous writers on symbolism, from Jack Kerouac to Ray Bradbury to Ayn Rand.)
On the qualities of a writer:
All my life Ive looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the
conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be
intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these things in one person and have him come through all the influences
that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writers radar and all great writers have
had it.
HOW TO READ A BOOK
How to Read a Book, originally written by Mortimer Adler in 1940 and revised with
Charles van Doren in 1972, is the kind of book often described as a living classic
classic because it deals with the fundamental and unchanging mesmerism of the
written word, and living because it does so in a way that divorces this mesmerism from its hard medium,
allowing the essence to evolve as our culture has evolved over the decades. From basic reading to systematic skimming
and inspectional reading to speed reading, Adlers how-tos apply as efficiently to practical textbooks and science books as
they do to poetry and fiction.
One of the books finest points deals with the fundamental yin-yang of how ideas travel and permeate minds the
intertwined acts of reading and writing. Marginalia those fragments of thought and seeds of insight we scribble in the
margins of a book have a social life all their own: just ask The New York TimesSam Anderson, who recently shared
his years worth of marginalia in a wonderful interactive feature. Hardly anything captures both the utilitarian necessity
and creative allure of marginalia better than this excerpt from Adlers classic:
When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of
purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of
yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it which comes to the same thing is by writing in it.
Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is
active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot
express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.
Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you
probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the
teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the
author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.
First featured here, along with a meditation on modern marginalia, in December.


How To Be a Nonconformist: 22 Irreverent Illustrated Steps to
Counterculture Cred from 1968
by Maria Popova
Avoid socks. They are a fatal giveaway of a phony nonconformist.
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?, James Thurberasked in the caption to a 1958 New
Yorker cartoon depicting a woman fed up with her artist partner. It remains unknown whether the cartoon itself, or this cultural
dismay shared by some of the eras counterculture thinkers, inspired the 1968 gem How To Be a Nonconformist (public library)
by Elissa Jane Karg. One could easily imagine that if Edward Gorey, master of pen-and-ink irreverence, and Patti Smith,
godmother of punk-rock, had collaborated, this wouldve been the result. But whats most impressive is that Karg was only
sixteen at the time, a self-described cynical & skeptical junior at Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk, Connecticut,
qualified to examine nonconformity as an angry and amused observer of her cool contemporaries.

With her irresistibly wonderful black-and-white drawings and hand-lettered text, which originally appeared in her school
newspaper and were eventually published by Scholastic, she offers 22 rules for becoming a bona fide nonconformist, poking
fun at so many archetypes still strikingly prevalent perhaps even amplified today: the misunderstood artist-hipster, the
troll grubbing for clout by spewing curmudgeonly comments, the protester-for-the-sake-of-protesting, the musician flaunting
her mental health issues as a badge of genius. Rather than derision, however, Kargs subtler message is a reminder that, as
Toni Morrison memorably wrote in Beloved, definitions belong to the definers, not the defined, that a full life is
about allowing the various petals of our identity to fully unfold, and that adhering to any prescriptive mode of living, even
if its one that rejects the herd of mainstream culture, only flattens us into caricatures of our complete selves and
transforms us into a herd of a different kind, one the cultural critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the herd of
independent minds.





















Karg, in true counter-nonconformist fashion, didnt end up moving to New York City and commodify her brand of creative
cynicism. Instead, she moved to Detroit, had two daughters, joined the socialist party, became a nurse, and led an earnest life as
an avid advocate for womens rights on the cusp of the second wave of feminism. Tragically, though perhaps poetically given her
life choices, she was killed in 2008 at the age of 57 while riding her bicycle back from a socialist party meeting. She never
authored another book, but did co-author the 1980 handbook Stopping Sexual Harassment.
Immeasurably wonderful, How To Be a Nonconformist is long out of print but surviving copies of can be found online.
Complement it with Exactitudes, the modern-day photo-anthropological record of the cultural phenomenon Karg satirizes.