Megan Elizabeth Morris (aka MEM, Megan the M.) is a bonafide professional catalyst and adventurer. As the Ideaschema instigator, orchestrator and autodidact, she is hopelessly addicted to Making Things Happen.

Lewis Hyde: “My book is dedicated to my late father, by profession a physicist with a specialty in optics. As the dedication says, it was he who first told me about ‘Dollond’s case,’ an eighteenth-century patent dispute involving telescope lenses in which Lord Mansfield ruled that ownership of an idea belonged not to the person who kept his invention secret but to the person ‘who brought it forth for the benefit of mankind.’”

Confession: I still haven’t read The Gift. It fascinated the life out of me when I started it, but something else was going on at the time — and right about then, I stopped reading non-fiction for awhile and crawled into a happy Jacqueline Carey fantasy fiction coma. As delicious as that was, I’m starting to crave my non-fiction again now; I’m listening to Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (because TED sent me his follow-up book, and I can’t bear to read them out of order), and the venerable Cory Doctorow has reminded me that Lewis Hyde’s wonderful volume on creativity and gift-giving is still sitting right there next to my bed, waiting for me to remember that it exists.

Context: There were too books that grabbed my attention when I attended Seth Godin’s Linchpin Session in January: Hyde’s The Gift, and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The War of Art, of course, is epic. If you haven’t read it, grab a copy; it won’t take you long. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s brilliant. If my stash space for extra books wasn’t completely overflowing with Linchpin books right now, I’d be buying up copies of Pressfield, too…

At any rate.

I was staring into space yesterday morning, half zonked on “tea”. (Look, there was maybe a quarter of a shot of whisky. I promise. I was not knocking back ounce after ounce, it was a tiny bit of whisky in a mug of boiled water. It’s not even all that tasty, it’s watered-down whisky — if I wanted to have a party, I’d be at the Merlyn Welsh creme liquor I brought back from Penderyn. And I wouldn’t do it in my pajamas on a deserted Sunday morning. I’d invite you and all your closest friends. Duh.)

…Staring into space, yes, mindlessly flicking through RSS feeds to occupy my whimsical but dysfunctional Sunday morning brain… and I came across this:

Lewis “The Gift” Hyde talks Creative Commons and sharing (Boing Boing)

Great. Just great. The man already has two books out that I wanted to read (the second is Trickster Makes This World, and it looks fantastic). I put off reading The Gift for a measly seven months and he comes out with a third one, heavily overlapping Creative Commons issues and such subjects as I typically adore. Where the hell are my photoreading materials? Am I going to have to blast through these? Like I don’t have enough to do already?

And the thought process goes on, but ultimately, no, I probably won’t blast through them. They’re all going to be too good (and I doubt the formatting of those in particular would be all that easy to photoread anyway). It’s obviously time for me to get back in the game. Limber up my eyeballs. Just in time, too — because as I’ve been sorting through posessions and abjuring Marty — Man With the Strength to Carry Big Boxes of Books — to cart them away to Good Will, I’ve been realizing how much some of these books mean to me. And how lusty I feel about reading some of them.

Mmmmm, good books. I would open a bookstore… and only carry books like these. (Is that a viable plan? Who wants to go on in this with me? Speaking of books, I should probably give a way a few copies of Linchpin, while I’m thinking about it…)

Ahem.

As close to my heart as these narratives are — the ones in Linchpin, The War of Art, and indubitably The Gift though my dogear bookmarks a page at the bare outset of the second chapter — I cannot abide being kept from them by little things. The electric bill, for instance. The random distraction of telemarketers. The empty gas tank or refrigerator. The urge to bathe, or eat. Mere trifles.

And if you want to understand why, you’ll probably have to read them, too. ;}

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