Lillian Boxfish, Rooney’s fictional creation, has “always cultivated a magpie mind” and uses city walks to facilitate “sideways” thinking, specifically for the purposes of composing verse and advertisements, allowing the city to help her collage together images and ideas, to innovate and see anew. Macy’s,” as raw material for a book about flânerie, a stance as much of a practice, not just walking in cities but being open to encounter, a receptivity to that which the city seems so insistently to be saying. Rooney, here, uses the story-the fantastic one, thanks to archival research-of Margaret Fishback, city-person and poet, plus the “highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the world during the 1930s, thanks to her brilliant work for R.H.
Studies of cities spring up-less academic than amateur detective in genre-those possessed by such experiences scribblings notes, scotch-taping together portfolios, cabinets of curiosity on the page: Lunch Poems or Paris Peasant, Harlem Is Nowhere or Open City. Which sure doesn’t mean that those open-eyed city-folk don’t talk about it, going on and on about its serendipitous juxtapositions, those moments that are uncanny with some sense of a transcendence, as if beneath the sidewalk there really were some plan, some knowledge. What is the city to the self who lives-really lives, eyes open, on the streets-within it? More than a thinking device, more than a frame of subjectivity or an optics, an ethics, it becomes a kind of horizon, a referent and limit at once visible yet always out of the reach of articulation.
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