The Island Magic of Being Invisible

The Island Magic of Being Invisible(A Song for My Partners)Six months later,a thought occurred to me;Writing for Youtube is like writingfor radio and TV.Every writer has at their disposalthe same techniques and tools;microphones, sound effectsand cameras of every kind.But if you will succeedyou must limit yourselfto the microphone of your keystrokes;the sound effects and cameras of your mind.When we hear the words of Shakespearethey become music in our ear,and when we hear Robert Frostwe are no longer lost.Those rhythms, mental music,and refrainsremind me of the languageof the Bible of King James.So what now,shall we do?I will try to imitate themand you will, too.We will write wordsfor television and radio.We will tell stories and our clientswill get rich you know.We will write essaysand teach everything we show.People will rememberwhat we taught thembut forget who told themthat it was so.We will write songsthat make singerscomprehensible.But we ourselveswill always be invisible.Why do we do this,you and I?We do itbecause we have to,we don’t needto know why.We do it becausewe feel compelled.Writing is the only timewe don’t feellike we should be doingsomething else.Roy H. WilliamsPennie and I were in New York 40 years ago for ArtExpo in the Jacob K. Javits Center. We spent 3 days looking at more than 10,000 pieces of pieces of art and meeting many hundreds of artists as we walked those 500,000 square feet together. At the end of the show we went home with only 3 pieces, all of which were purchased from a relatively unknown Israeli artist named Reudor Gratch.We invited Reudor and his wife, Effie, to dinner that night at “One if By Land, Two if By Sea” in Greenwich Village. We had an incredible evening with them.The next day, I picked up a newspaper when I noticed that one of the serigraphs we had purchased from Reudor was one of only THREE pieces of art the newspaper had photographed for their review of that year’s ArtExpo.You can see it at the top of this page.