Thursday, August 9, 2007

Hotel Theory

I've got the new Wayne Koestenbaum in my hands. "Hotel Theory" (Soft Skull) is two books in one, a satirical [I want to add: Oulipo-esque or Ballardian, but to untrained ears that might sound pretentious, and I never find Koestenbaum pretentious] pulp novel and a mostly serious phenomenology of hotels, intended to be read side by side. Like Derrida's "Glas," for example, or -- more entertainingly than that, if I do say so myself -- Joshua Glenn's "The Real Thing," whose parallel texts invite the reader to discover and invent connections between Van Wyck Brooks's "America's Coming-of-Age" and the curved Coca-Cola bottle. (In the current issue of Cabinet.)

Hotels, as we know from reading Sartre and Kerouac, among many others, or from watching movies like "The Shining" or "Touch of Evil," are places where you go in order to experience existential malaise and vertigo. The curtains are drawn, the bellboy has been tipped... the void gapes. Nowadays, of course, there's cable TV and on-demand porn movies to distract yourself. But the abyss still beckons: Get unstuck! Lose your memory! Choose to be someone else, or nobody at all. So think of Koestenbaum as the private eye (not the hotel dick, who's part of the problem) who traipses from hotel room to hotel room, all over town -- more nomadic than a hotel-dweller, yet able to gain perspective, which at least permits you to enjoy your symptom.

Koestenbaum, a distinguished professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, wants to know why hotels are sloughs of despond -- and why so many of us are attracted to hotels for that very reason. The theoretical column of text in "Hotel Theory" addresses the former question, and the sleazy fiction on the other side of the page addresses the latter. Neither side provides an answer, but perhaps an appropriately stereoscopic reading strategy does?

There's a kooky description of Koestenbaum's book in the summer edition of Bookforum:

Formally, "Hotel Theory" is redolent of Arno Schmidt's linguistic ingenuity and solipsism, while its content is tinged with Peter Sotos's lime-streaked animus. Koestenbaum established his aim "to refurbish the meaning of hotel" by reading, or occupying, Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time." "Heidegger was my hotel,"� he writes, enabling his examination of "never dwelling anywhere." Just as hotel rooms are inhabited by a series of disparate personalities, each reference yields a stream of inconsonant concepts; Heidegger inspires both philosophical meditation and memories of custard pie.

Impossible to parse! Yet these lines do suggest what it's like to read Koestenbaum: He's gossipy, distracted, often funny, impossibly erudite, stylistically exciting, philosophically and theoretically adventurous. (Soft Skull is a good fit for him.) Much, then, is required of the reader. "Hotel Theory" is, for this reason, lousy beach reading... but perfect for airports, train stations. And, of course, hotels.

PS: Soft Skull, as I've reported, has merged with Counterpoint. Check out forthcoming titles here. For links to the combined Soft Skull and Counterpoint catalogs, go here.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:54 AM

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