Don’t Touch The Poet: The Life and Times of Joel Oppenheimer by Lyman Gilmore (review)

66 Reviews of the shop with the alphanumeric world (contracts, economic relationships , etc.). Coco Fusco talked about her contact with workers in the electronic factories along the U.S./Mexico border and the exploitative conditions that she found; she argued that one had not only to examine the process of consumption of cyberspace, but also the processes of production. Antonio Muntadas talked about how, in the new situation, the activity of “hybridization” took on positive connotations. My overwhelming impression from the event was the paucity of analytical and critical apparatus at our disposal for even describing the communities and spaces being built (Mitchell called for empirical studies of what E-mail was actually used for). Yet the organizers clearly demonstrated that there is an exciting emerging topic that brings together architects, designers, artists, technologists and scholars in the humanities as well as the business players who are busy staking out new territory and building the infrastructure we will depend on. The event was co-sponsored by the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Information Institute, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Culture Net. The organizers were David Jensen, Moira Kenney and Marcos Novak. The Web site has some of the workshop presentation material available. BOOKS COMPOSITION: A SERIES OF EXERCISES IN ART STRUCTURE FOR THE USE OF STUDENTS AND TEACHERS by Arthur Wesley Dow. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A., 1997. $29.95. ISBN: 0-520-20749-1. Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue , Dysart, IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. Email : . The American painter Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) was greatly swayed by the Arts and Crafts movement and by Japanese woodblock prints. In 1899, while curator of the Japanese Department at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he published the first edition of this famous illustrated handbook on five principles of composition: opposition, transition , subordination, repetition and symmetry . Reissued into the 1940s in more than 20 editions, it became one of the most widely read art books of the century . This is a facsimile of the 13th edition (originally published in 1920), introduced by a new 60-page essay by art historian Joseph Masheck on the book’s cultural context, its wide-ranging effects and why it is all but forgotten today. To understand the extent to which Dow influenced modern artists, teachers and architects (among his students were Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Weber), I found it additionally helpful to read Kevin Nute’s book Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (1993), particularly chapter five, entitled “Composition : The Picture, the Plan, and the Pattern, as Aesthetic Line-Ideas.” (Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, Spring 1998.) DON’T TOUCH THE POET: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOEL OPPENHEIMER by Lyman Gilmore. Talisman House, Jersey City, NJ, U.S.A., 1998. $21.95. ISBN: 1-883689-64-3. Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue , Dysart, IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. Email : . Joel Oppenheimer (1930–1988) was an American poet (four of his books were published by Walter Hamady’s Perishable Press) who studied with Charles Olson at Black Mountain College and suffered throughout his life from agoraphobia , a panic disorder. Despite its name, agoraphobia is not a fear of open spaces, but a diffuse dread of existence (William James called its attacks “vastations”), like an intense, terrifying stage fright, in which, as Shakespeare said, “all the world is a stage.” In the case of Oppenheimer, who lived most of his life in New York, he “hated crowds, never learned to drive, feared travel, took cabs daily to and from the Lion’s Head Tavern five blocks from his apartment, tried to maintain absolute control of things and people around him, and stuck to such a rigid daily routine from place to place in the Village that people said they could set their clocks by his passing.” As self-medication, and perhaps from alcoholism, he drank heavily for 20 years (consuming daily, in later the store), the economy of presence and the development of intensified spaces (electronic fronts for architectural backs), the last of which needed elaboration. Benedikt provoked the audience with a discourse about the poverty...