Hotel Theory

Reading Hotel Theory by Wayne Kostenbaum.  Not sure what I think.  I like the idea of Hotel Theory and some of the posits he makes along the way but I am also disappointed by the surface skimming and dancing around the topic he does.  Of course I might just be reading it wrong.

There are two books or texts set side by side.  The one of the left is Hotel Theory and more or less that is what it pretends to be with weaving in and our of Heidegger, popular culture, history and any and all things 'hotel.'  The one on the right is Hotel Women a self described pulp or dime store novel employing a not articles device to tell a story of Liberace and Lana Turner staying in the Hotel Women.

Two texts relate thematically and physically by the structure of the publication but do not read across as a unified text or overlapping dialogue might in a play.  So like a book full of marginalia one text competes with the other.   How is it meant to be read?   One book and then the other?  Together alternating lines, paragraphs or chapters?  I tried various versions of merging and/or overlapping the texts but then gave up on that and read first the Hotel Women story and now am reading the Hotel Theory as way to re-read Hotel Women.

I may have made a mistake.   I am even more impatient with the discursiveness of Hotel Theory after scene filled Hotel Women with a sufficient hint of plot and tension as to pretend to story. 

But then the problem may largely be my own unmet desire to read a theory of hotels that would posit something I might apply to my experiences of travel and place.  A Hotel Theory that would unpack the complex hierarchy of the Hotel.  The class system with the staff and the divide between guest and staff.   The modeling of power structures mirror the cities and societies these hotels occupy while dislocating these structures inside and outside of history and place. 

I want to be reading how the Hotel is homunculus more magical and mysterious than any alchemy can imagine.  And how this little fully formed being is itself representative of and actual.  I want to assign terms and systems to the Hotel that attempt to account for being both place and idea, human and a profane representative of humanity.