Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

An exchange of letters in the January 2016 issue of Harper's reminds me that back in the 1990s, when Stephen Glass was notoriously making stuff up for The New Republic, he also made stuff up in other publications as well. An article of his ran in the Harper's for February 1998, titled "Prophets and Losses." It concerned telephone psychics, portraying a business in which phony psychics try to keep callers on the line as long as possible in order to sock them with astronomical charges. As was often the case with Glass' frauds, it is easy to believe the broad outlines of what he was saying, which is precisely why people weren't necessarily vigilant about the details, which he invented. In the latest issue, Glass provides a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of what he fabricated for that story, a breakdown that will be unreadable for anyone who doesn't have the actual text of the story n front of them. Fortunately, this is 2016, and you can find that he...

From a recent book by Howard Blum: Dark Invasion (2014). Ever since the 1880s, when Kansas City undertaker Almon Strowger invented what became known as the Strowger switch, it had become easy to listen in on a telephone call. Strowger's circuit-switched system, an ingenious electromagnetic contraption that clicked and clacked noisily like a telegraph key, did the operator's work. The Strowger switch automatically connected the relays and slides at the central telephone offices, completing the circuit that allowed people to talk to each other. Twist another wire around the right switch at the central office and a party line was created: you could hear someone's conversation and he'd never know it....It didn't take long for Wall Street speculators to realize fortunes could be made with the sort of inside information collected by eavesdropping on telephone conversations....

From a David Foster Wallace story: "Firm Doctors Telephone Poles." If you get it, you can stop reading here. If not, I'll help. --------------------------------- When I first read that sentence, I saw "telephone" as the verb. Obviously doctors -- apparently those with a certain unwavering deliberativeness in their manner -- were calling Polish people on the phone. It took awhile for the other way of reading it to occur to me. But "telephone poles" together could be the object of the sentence. Presumably, there are business entities somewhere that repair and maintain old and broken telephone poles. They "doctor" such poles. Just thought it worth recording here.