"The Anatomy of Harpo Marx": Singular Actor Singularly Celebrated

Wednesday, April 11
Harpo Marx — that industrious nonsense-maker, that weirdly peripheral cynosure, that genius of the rambunctious nonsequitur — at last has the celebrant he deserves. In The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Wayne Koestenbaum — that industrious poet, critic, and occasional sense-maker — catalogs every significant Harpo moment from the Marx Brothers' 13 movies, capturing the spirit and detail of the muted comic's performance and then working each through the wringer of cultural criticism. Like his subject, Koestenbaum here demonstrates little use for formality, and just slightly more for established forms, opting instead to pen squirrely, surprising notes rather than fully weighted essays.

Location Info

Map

San Francisco Art Institute

800 Chestnut
San Francisco, CA 94133

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: North Beach/ Chinatown

Photos

0 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

City Lights Books

261 Columbus
San Francisco, CA 94133

Category: Retail

Region: North Beach/ Chinatown

Photos

Details

Koestenbaum discusses the book at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the San Francisco Art Center. He will also read from Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background, his latest collection of poetry, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 12, at City Lights. For more information, visit www.citylights.com.

Related Content

• Underbelly Laughs: With Two S.F. Companies, You Can Never Be Sure that the Fellatio Isn't Real
  April 24, 2013
• Crazy Headlines of 1900 -- a Weirder and Deadlier San Francisco
  August 15, 2012
• "Rise of the Guardians": Adventures with Santa and Co.
  November 21, 2012
• "Hello I Must Be Going": Melanie Lynskey's Low-Key Greatness
  September 19, 2012
• Christian Marclay's "The Clock" is the World's Most Elaborate Timepiece
  April 17, 2013

More About

• Wayne Koestenbaum
• Harpo Marx
• The Marx Brothers
• Margaret Dumont

That approach is thrilling: A paragraph on Harpo giving Margaret Dumont a push in the keister is subtitled "The Covert Political Necessity of Claiming That Harpo Is Butt-Centered." On Harpo seizing and hugging a football in Horse Feathers: "We call this a fetal position, but it is also a Pieta, a curlicue, an autophagia, an inward tunneling, like the leaf pattern on a Corinthian capital." On a man Koestenbaum spied at a bathhouse around the time he was writing about  At the Circus: "Meditatively, he rubbed medicinal ointment on his irritated penis, which had retreated, whether from timidity or distress, into a diminished nub." For every penetrating insight he offers, Koestenbaum chucks in free-associative treats, overreaching connections, chunks of autobiography, and reams of sharp and beautiful description. It's like he shoved his brain and a Marx Brothers box set into a woodchipper — and if you think you might enjoy that, you probably will.