As a kid, when I first learned how to tape-record songs off the radio, they released so many singles from Bad that I thought I could record the whole album. I didn't understand why the radio station wouldn't let me hear that much of any other records.

Tracer on MJ the dancer.

[Three notes on joy]

'Incurious'— a cardinal sin.

'She sang pop music.'

'Reading the essay now, I still sense in it the initial exhilaration in finding ways to mean everything I was saying, and to say a larger fraction of what I had philosophically to say, than I had ever experienced. The elation was an experience as of escaping from what I had inarticulately felt in my philosophical education, and remaining in much of philosophy's dispensation as I began my life of teaching philosophy, as prohibitions on, or suspicions of, everyday speech, quite in the absence of patient attention to the individual utterance.'

'Surely there will be a day of reckoning…'

Train metaphors make their way into German James Brown reviews as much as English ones.

The slow despair of boarding a cool, quiet, empty bus that does not stay that way.

DIY Moretti-ism for the interviews in the second part of The Savage Detectives.

'I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.'