 Welcome back to the Agora Cafe for more coffee and philosophy. And although this episode is technically an episode in my independent bookstores of San Diego series, well, I mean it is entry in that series, but it's also a lot more than that. Like the previous one in lookbooks, it could also belong just in the regular section on interviews with interesting people. Since this one is about the eternal return bookshop in San Diego, which is an antiquarian philosophical bookshop, or devoted to rare editions of works of philosophy. And so the owner and I, Jeff Masachi, and yes that is how he pronounces it. It's not, it's not my kidding. We talk a lot about, about philosophy and about Nietzsche and Plato and teaching and books and various things. So again, like, like the last, like the last one, the last entry in the series, the previous one of lookbooks, it's realism. So I think it's an interview appeal to people even if they have no interest in, you know, in checking out the San Diego bookstore scene in particular. Although I do have a San Diego scene behind me that is the art museum in San Diego, which I thought was particularly appropriate. Because we talk a lot about art and I love the sort of, I think it's a flatteresque style of architecture. I believe that's what it is, sort of a Spanish Portuguese style that, that draws on, on bits of Romanesque and Gothic and Moorish and neoclassical and various things. I don't think that. I think Frank Lloyd Wright would like it, he'd want to. But you know, although I really like Frank Lloyd Wright, I know my aesthetic values are more eclectic than his but that's a digression, but there are a lot of digressions in this, in this interview. Anyway, I think this is again I think that this is an interview you will enjoy even if you're, you know, even if you're not in the series, and even if you're not the market for some of his, his, his books because his books are rare first editions that not everyone can afford but they are, but nevertheless we have a really interesting discussion about both books anyway so enough, enough preamble. Here comes the interview. Well, today I'm pleased to have with me Jeff Pizzacci of the eternal return bookstore in San Diego, and which is a fairly unusual bookstore and Jeff can you tell us a bit about the bookstore and about your history with it and what, what kinds of things you carry and why I can't possibly afford them. Yeah, um, a lot of questions there. So, you know, the first thing will kind of a bookstore. Not it's it's less of a bookstore, you know, and more of a corner of the living room is a shop that's run out of the home. And that's interesting. I sometimes since I'm on Yelp and I have a website, and I have a Facebook page, you know, oftentimes I'll get, especially pre pandemic. I would get phone calls from people who are in San Diego on business, saying that they were looking for my shop and they wanted to come and browse, and I would get back in touch with them and let them know that, you know, it's, it's not, it's not really a bookstore in the traditional sense that we think of where you go when you browse the stacks and find these volumes hidden away somewhere. It's out of the home. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, um, you know, and I am very specialized as as we had been communicating by email, you know, you being a philosophy professor and the books that I carry are are almost entirely philosophy books. I can speak, you know, your shirt is sort of fits into the theme. Yes, it's the title page, the critique of pure reason. Yeah, it's the title page from the first edition of cons critique of pure reason, which is in the history of philosophy, one of the one of the more important books to own if you're intending to have a sizable collection in western philosophy. You know, the, the, to the point about being so so narrowly focused on on philosophy books. Another phone call that I often field would be a phone call from someone who has a box of books from their grandparents attic kind of thing and, you know, a lot of them are sort of literature sets or, you know, encyclopedia Britannicus from the 70s or something like that and so I often find myself reminding people that that I'm pretty pretty niche pretty pretty narrowly focused on philosophy. How the bookstores are fairly unusual, although the, you know, there's one in Paris, as you've run, although it's not it's not antiquarian it's it's maybe just sort of contemporary stuff full of English and French mainly but they're, you know, that's that's the only other philosophy only bookstore that I'm aware of offhand. Yeah, a good friend of mine, and actually kind of related to the story of how I got started. Bill Shaberg of Athena rare books in Fairfield Connecticut. I really credit him with my, my beginnings. Let's see it was probably I think it was January or so of 2006. I was just I was living in San Francisco at the time and just in a in a bit of boredom kind of browsing around on the internet, just decided to in the search window on eBay. I typed Nietzsche. Just, you know, my background is in is in philosophy undergraduate I have a master's degree, and I also my full time job as a teacher, high school teacher I teach philosophy and literature. But I just typed and what popped up was the 1893. Second edition of Zarathustra in German. Just that, you know, a couple thousand dollars maybe 2500 something like that. And I just started communicating with the person who posted it and I thought, wow, I could own a book that was published while Nietzsche was still alive. He died in 1900 as you know. I was really enamored by that thought that I could, you know, own a book that that was on this earth at the same time that he was and I have a particular fondness for Nietzsche and his philosophy. And so I made an offer crazy offer and the seller accepted the offer and I ended up acquiring the book with some some money that I had tucked away. So I started to dig around and do some research to try to figure out what is this book because Zarathustra has an interesting publication history. The first part published in 1883 part two and three 1884 part four published in a very small private 40 copies in 1885 but not publicly until 1891. So 1893 represented the first time all four parts of Zarathustra were published together and sequential pagination, rather than kind of put together as separate separately published pieces. So I started to find all this information out and trying to figure out like what is this book really worth vis-a-vis what I paid for it, and had been communicating with this person named William. And as I was contacting other rare book sellers, they said, oh, you really should talk to this guy bill this guy bill and then finally put two and two together. Bill was William, we had been communicating Bill Shaber of Athena rare books, because he published a book. I forget the date, but it's called the Nietzsche canon and it's the bibliography of Nietzsche's works which he did extensive research to chronicle the, you know, all the confusing data and information as it relates to the first editions and the new editions of Nietzsche's work. So I got in touch with Bill and I saw that he had some other books that I might be interested in, as I wanted to grow my collection from one to two books. And it happened to be, like I said January I think of 2006. And some of the books I asked about were on their way from Connecticut to Los Angeles because there was a big book fair in Los Angeles, the ABAA California Book Fair. And so he said, Oh, you should, you should check it out. And so I remember my, my girlfriend who at the time now my wife. I turned to her when she got home from work. And I said we were living as I said we were living in San Francisco at the time I said, Do you feel like driving down to Los Angeles this weekend. She said why so now there's a rare book fair and she kind of looked at me with that puzzled look. What are rare books what's a rare book fair what does all this mean. So I went to to Rebecca, she just said yes, yeah, let's go why not. So we drove down to LA and I ended up, I met Bill. And I bought a first edition copy of Nietzsche's birth of tragedy from 1872, which I think is a book that's often overlooked in Nietzsche's canon, but it informs so much of his later works. And Nietzsche of course is just coming to her. I'm giving a little bit of everything. You know, I'm not just doing other big things by doing I do like the scurril works that no one reads. Oh good. Yeah, I should zoom in and attend your class. It would be fun. I'm sure you're probably still zooming into the second semester. Yeah, which, which, you know a lot of us out here are doing as well. So I ended up becoming great friends with Bill and I continue to acquire some rare books, and then as I would acquire more books I would find another copy of a book that I already owned and then I would want to start selling so I started to work with Bill at book fairs, starting to sell some of my own books and started to grow an inventory of my own and started to to make some money off of it as well. And so, as, let's see that was you know 2006 we continued on and then 2015 was when my wife and I moved down to San Diego. We have kids and her family is here and so we wanted to be closer to grandma etc. And I decided at that point 2015, rather than sort of working with Bill sort of on different sides of the continent him in Connecticut and me in California, I decided to just launch my own bookshop. At that point I had about 200 volumes or so that I had acquired and you know almost entirely philosophy books. I started to move into some of the more philosophically inspired literature for a period of time because I also brewed my own beer, I dabbled a bit in collecting and selling important books in the history of beer brewing. Books in that field but decided since I have limited income and limited time and limited space I wanted to really focus on just philosophy which is really my first love. And, and so unloaded all those beer books and continue to, to grow my philosophy collection with a few philosophically inspired literature I have a signed copy of Ralph Ellison's invisible man. You know which is a visible link. Yeah, they're all yeah they're all signed an invisible link exactly. I have a couple, the first two issues of Dostoevsky's crime and punishment published in 1866 and the Russian messenger, which is another book that I teach, and you know sort of thinking about, I'm starting to move in the direction of, you know, I might soon acquire one of Chernyshevsky's pieces which was sort of that that positivism and rational egoism in 19th century Russian philosophy that so much inspired the literature of the time that was something that Dostoevsky really underground man. Which, which was very influential in in Dostoevsky's notes from underground which also informed Ralph Ellison's invisible man, which you know you can see a lot of the stylistic elements that are similar but just as someone who was responding to sort of the social constructs of the time. So, you know, the core of my collection really is is philosophy books with at times sort of journeying into some of the philosophically inspired literature, which I've, I've been cautious about doing because that could open up a whole other kind of thinking about limited funds limited space that I have and limited time because my full time job is as a high school teacher wanting to keep it focused primarily on on philosophy. And, you know, I for a period of time was acquiring a number of 20th century French philosophy, but have even started to curb that a bit and trying to focus on 19th century or older philosophy, although I still have a number of the 20th century French. So that's kind of, you know, a bit of the story, kind of in broad strokes, you know, about what going on 15 years now of, of being interested in acquiring and dealing in rare philosophy books. So, I don't know if you have particular questions stemming off of that, but I mean, I mean, you mentioned in some of the emails some examples of some particularly, you know, exciting books that you either have or have mad. Like these go because the fondness played out. You can see anything more about some of the. Yeah, some of the books that I have. So, um, you can see some of them behind me. Actually, there's a, you know, some of the shelves that you can see over there, you can see the Stefanus play those the tall, I can actually bring you over and and look so this is beautiful me. There we go. Three volume 1578 so the Stefanus play though which you know as a philosophy professor, you know, any translation of Plato's works you have those numbers in the margins and students are always asking me what are those numbers in the margins mean what is what does, you know, 537 a mean and the side of whatever text from Plato reading and so I told them it goes back to the Stefanus play though, which is actually a 10 but right, right and the speed standard for you know any kind of notes and so forth around Greek text as well as having Latin because people are more people can read ancient Greek are more likely to share a lap and they are to share any, any modern language I think it's the summits and still to those certainly especially to that man. Yeah, yeah. And so that those, you know the pages the Stefanus or the atn numbers in the margins corresponds to that particular edition 1578, which I acquired a couple years ago. You know from someone who does not deal in philosophy and that's one of the interesting things about sort of this niche market and sort of the, the upper echelon I guess of the rare and antiquarian books, and book shops is that a lot of the sellers would specialize and so if they acquire something that's not necessarily in their area of specialty, they'll try to move that along quickly to someone who would specialize in that and, you know, be able to maybe have a customer for that or at least have inventory you know I think a lot of times we sellers, especially those of us who started as collectors. A lot of times I know for myself I see myself as kind of being a steward of these books and almost like I'm a curator that as I acquire books I try to think about why those books would belong on these shelves behind me and another places in our house that what is it that holds them together whether it's an author, whether it's an author and all sort of the other people around that author who might have written in response to the ideas that are circulating. And so, so it's interesting to me I often think of it as like whirlpools, where, you know, a book will eventually find its rightful owner, or it's rightful seller slash owner right because I think oftentimes we see ourselves on the fence between a collector and a seller. And, you know, eventually it finds its right place for a period of time before, you know, ultimately, like I said we're all stewards of these books these books have existed long before we have, and hopefully will continue to exist long after we, we are gone. So we're really just taking care of them. And so trying to get them collected together. A recent catalog that I did, maybe not so recent maybe about a year and a half ago on the radical enlightenment. I was always interested in Spinoza as a graduate student, happened to be able to work with a professor who was very, is very Stephen Barboni, very influential, writes a lot has published a lot on Spinoza. I was in grad school got to work with him and really got to know, you know, a lot of the ins and outs of Spinoza and then I forget what year Jonathan Israel published his book, radical enlightenment. Jonathan Israel, I believe is still teaching at Princeton. And that book, you know, it's thick book my kids my eight year old twin boys often laugh about how that book is always sitting around the house and they pick it up and pretend to read it at times but kind of separating what is often seen as, you know, the typical epistemological break between the rationalists and the empiricists where you kind of lump Descartes and Spinoza together but really teasing them apart Jonathan Israel between kind of the moderate or even the conservative rationalists like Descartes and the more radical ones like Spinoza. So a couple years ago I decided to comb through Jonathan Israel's book after having read it and pulled out just in notes what are some of the big books that were a part of the radical enlightenment and just started to acquire them and ended up collecting and gathering together about 15 or 20 volumes on in and around Spinoza and the radical enlightenment. Never got a copy of the Spinoza's truck Tata so it's a difficult one to acquire five different printings. There's some confusion about which ones came first all these issue points but I do, I still have a copy of Spinoza's opera with the ethics in it. But a lot of the books that were informed by Spinoza or informed Spinoza that were highlighted in Jonathan Israel's book. And like I said did a collection of those that it's actually the list is still available on my website. This is list number four that I put together which if anyone who's viewing this goes to eternal return bookshop.com. Some of my lists are still there collection of a rig array 20th century French but also the radical enlightenment list and collection, which at the time included one of the clandestine manuscripts that were circulating in the early 18th century. And, you know, these these handwritten manuscripts that people would would, you know, shuffle around Europe that were meant to evade the detection of the authorities, the ecclesiastical authorities, etc. Because the ideas were believed to be so dangerous because of their, their, their lack of idealism, I suppose, and too much materialism that the church saw as as a threat to its very existence. So which is why Spinoza's, you know, Spinoza's early works, you know the first editions of his works his name is not on the title page because because the, the, the, the need to publish anonymously was part of what protected the author. Although his, his opera. Go ahead. He acknowledged the two fetuses. You know, he acknowledged the essay, but not the two fetuses because, even after the, you know, after the revolution that the two treatises were supposedly written in support of. So obviously thought his geniuses were more radical than the, than the regime that he had helped inaugurate would have happened. So, he still he had the copy filed in his own library under a for anonymous. His, his, his, his rough manuscript for he had filed with his medical papers and the title D more vocalico the French disease, which was the term pacifist. So it could also be sort of code for tyranny. And he would break with friends if they ever publicly mentioned that he was the author even though eventually did become sort of a secret. Yeah, yeah. And that is the case for a lot of the writers of that time it was just, you know, walking that fine line between wanting to safely publish their ideas. But also to publish their ideas which sometimes we're not always seen as a safe. And we want to be cartelist works the world or the treatise on light. He was published when news came from Italy is going on with Galileo. Yeah. And he had, he had, he had also defended a heliocentric cosmos in the world among other possibly dangerous views. And so I think I'll just sit on this a while. Yeah. Yeah, so although he certainly was more conservative than Spinoza. And, you know, he was, you know, he was radical enough that he was he was always near the edge of trouble. Yeah, and I think he moves to Holland where where things were. Things were a little more liberal for writers. I think it was in the dedication to his meditations, where he, you know, kind of acknowledges this new science, but in a way that allows the church to accept it in some ways. I mean, I always characterize it as the, the, the science in the world can have the body and the church can have the mind or the soul and so his dualism allows for the church to not feel threatened by the materialism of the new science because that's the realm of, of physics and, and science. And then the church can maintain the mind and then Spinoza's like, you know, forget about all that it's all, it's all, you know, just just the same substance just different attributes of that. I ended up not liking what Descartes had to say about the mind either. Yeah, yeah, right, right. Yeah. Because of its, its idealism. I suppose. So, yeah, so, so that I mean that was a really exciting catalog that I put together when I stumbled across that idea and you know to what I was questioning earlier as Jonathan Israel still teaching at Princeton, he is because the rare book library and from Princeton contacted me. Gosh, it must be about a year ago. So maybe it was a couple years ago that I did the catalog but she said that she said she told me Professor Israel was very impressed with my, my collection he found my website and there was one of the books that I had that their official collections library didn't have and so because he noticed that he they ended up purchasing one of the books from me which was was pretty exciting to to to have that you know the person who wrote the book that got me to do that catalog reached out and I was able to sell sell him a book so I'm back that way. The kind of return. Yeah, right exactly you know in the eternal return I think there's so many layers to that number one it's, you know this idea that these books are always returning to their, their home whatever that is right So the books going on after us and so forth that I remember thinking I wonder whether that's connected with the title of the. It is and then all obviously I mean much more obviously when you see the, the logo of the bookshop to it's, you know, Nietzsche and the idea of the eternal return. And you know the rock of the eternal return is is worked into because a friend of mine who's a graphic artist helped to design that logo. But in sales Maria in Switzerland where Nietzsche would spend a lot of time, especially in the 80s the 1880s, he would do these walks along the lake, and he, when he came to that rock. And I've been there it's actually that that rock is where I asked my girlfriend at the time now wife to, to, to make to get married at that rock. Very cool yeah there's a personal reason, and there's a philosophical reason and then there's also kind of the book itself. But anyway I interrupted you what were you going to say. I was, you interrupted me interrupting you. In my, in my niche in modern literature class I have, I have this website is called an audio visual companion, because the, the books are meeting both by Nietzsche and by the other authors like Thomas man and Lawrence and so forth, have all these references both the places, and to bits of pieces of art and pieces of music and they're talking about them in great detail. And if the, you know, the students don't know what any of those are they're not really getting things so I have, so I have things with like the photos of the places including like that rock, and, and clips from some of the music that they are talking about, and some of the artworks they're discussing and so forth, because, you know, I mean, I don't say anything particularly deep about them but I just think that, you know, they, they really want to understand what these works are writing because his works are so invested in, in discussing these things. And Nietzsche of course is just constantly talking about his physical environment. Yep. His whole, his whole mood and his ability, even to function depends on, on location and whether he's in, in what he's at that moment regarding as a favorable location or not and so I want to show photos of those things. Yeah, it's so, no that's so important and I mean, you know, books and book shop aside just our connection as, as teachers as colleagues really, and thinking about all of the subtle ways that the, the illusions in the books that we teach are so important to understand and getting the students to, to listen to the pieces of music. And when I was living in San Francisco I took a class at Stanford on Nietzsche Wagner and the philosophy of pessimism and so much of that class involved listening to the operas of Wagner Tristan and he sold in contrast with Parseval, for example, and how Nietzsche listened to one and didn't like the other and sort of thinking about what the music is doing and understanding the music. I oftentimes in when I'm teaching Ralph Ellison's invisible man. I get the students to listen to the musical references because Ralph Ellison had studied music and every song every every piece of music that he mentions is intentional and to get the students to, to listen, for example, I forget which chapter is the end of chapter five. After Homer Barbies sermon he hears the narrator hears simultaneously Dvorak's New World Symphony and echoes of swing low sweet chariot from his mother and his grandmother and so I play what's wonderful about technology today right you can you can just punch those two things up on YouTube at the same time and listen to them simultaneously. And then the students start to understand the experience that excuse me Ralph Ellison is trying to get us to understand about the narrator so I think that's that's that's great I'm going to check out that that the sights and sounds that you mentioned that that is so important and just when I was in Sills Maria and walking along the lake and taking in the sites and we actually while we were in Sills Maria, we we lodged at the Nietzsche house we're able to stay there for the week that we were there and Peter who's the curator there was was great just giving us access to all kinds of stuff and tips and and things and just to be able to understand more what the what the words on the pages mean, and it's this is triggering a thought that I've often had to know I studied Nietzsche I studied Spinoza when I was in graduate school when I was an undergrad. But when I started to get into rare books and I started to understand the publication history of their books and the struggles that they faced and the ways in which they went about publishing their works. And that was not really part of the curriculum when I was studying the works themselves as a student. And so, I think it's even more true for Nietzsche because he went through so many struggles with getting things published and how poorly his works were received and how first editions would the unsold sheets would get turned into new editions and what that means when you have 1000 of them printed but only 192 sell and you have all these extras and then you create a new preface 1015 years later for a new edition. And it understanding the publication history of particular titles got me to understand even more the layers of what was going on in the works themselves and it, it, it made me realize and I do this a little bit as a teacher. I realize how important it is to, to make the struggles of publication, or the history of the publication itself, part of the ideas that are being taught, because you can't. You can't separate the two, you know, when, when, when Nietzsche believed so strongly in his ideas and to see that the public just disregarded them, you know, or take someone like Schopenhauer one of you know a book that I used to own the first printing of World as a representation, how poorly that sold, and all of the unsold copies were just pulped. I mean what does that do to the psyche of the author who poured their life into that, that particular work and just to have it just get pulped or get reissued in another edition, and that also doesn't sell. His mother was a was a famous novelist. And yeah, Schopenhauer's early works was called the fourfold root of the principle sufficient reason. Uh huh. And his mother looked at the title and said, fourfold root. Oh, you've taken up horticulture now have you. And he replied, Madam, my books will be remembered when years are long forgotten. I didn't know that story that's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. I understood even by his own mother and and what that what that does to the psyche of the of the author is it's just important and it's, it's, it's part of the book it's part of the ideas and, you know, a book contains ideas but a book is also an object that has a place in history. I just think that's, that's part of what is exciting to me about this bookshop, you know, back to sort of the reason for for this interview the bookshop itself and you know the hobby slash avocation that it has become in in my life, and I think about, you know, not just, you know, a title in a first edition, but, you know, a particular copy, right the provenance of that copy. I have a copy of the third untimely meditation of Nietzsche's the one on Schopenhauer as educator. I believe it is I have a copy of that in the original rappers that is inscribed by Nietzsche to Helen Zimmern, because Helen Zimmern had recently published a book on Schopenhauer his biography. And Helen Zimmern was close friends with the Wagner's and the Wagner's like Schopenhauer. And so, I don't know if it was Richard or Cosima Wagner who encouraged Nietzsche to send a copy of his Schopenhauer essay to Helen Zimmern who Nietzsche hadn't even met yet. And so he, he, he, you know, inscribed and then signed it, you know, the author, and had it sent to her and then later they became really good friends and they spent a lot of time together and sales Maria and then she ended up being the one who translated beyond good and evil. And I think just the first volume of human all to human into English in the early 20th century. 1907 1909 I think is when those were published in English. So I have the Schopenhauer book by Helen Zimmern and first edition I have the copy of the Schopenhauer essay inscribed by Nietzsche to Helen Zimmern and I have the copies of human all to human and beyond good and evil. And then it's translated into English by Helen Zimmern and so like again kind of the way that I see my role as curator like bringing these books together because their relationships to each other as objects not just as ideas but as objects both of those things kind of coming together. It's important between the, you know, the aims of a bookseller and the aims of a librarian slash. Yeah, the impurator because it was a part of this. It wants to just keep these books together and, you know, and you know, I have private choice of them and then there's the part of you that says, you know, both in order to make money in order to get them to people who, you know, who value them there's the right place to sell, but you know that I would I would find that agonizing tension if I were here. It is that's a good that's a perfect way to capture it. It's an agonizing tension. People often talk about buyers remorse. Right. You buy the car you drive it off the lot. Damn, why did I buy that or any expensive thing. Right. But I've often experienced sellers remorse where I sell a book. I think, wait a minute. I want, I want to still have that. And will I ever be able to acquire it again because they're so elusive, particularly books that that maybe belong with other books or, you know, books that you know it's a particular copy that has particular resonance but yet it's an agonizing that that emerges oftentimes, you know, I said earlier I currently have a copy of Spinoza's opera from 1677, which contains his ethics first edition, but it's the second copy that I've had. I had a copy years ago, and then I sold it, and I had complete sellers remorse. I missed that book. I loved that book, the original vellum. And so I, there are a handful of books that some of them I don't have listed, because I don't think I'm ready to depart with them. And, you know, some I do have listed but maybe the price is a little higher than it should be, because I, it's, it's one that that I'm not ready to let go but I think it's an important one to to maybe have out there. And then, you know, to think about the the eternal return right and sort of the books sort of were stewards of the books and getting them to the right owners. One of the things that I love about my bookshop and it's probably because it's so small and it's so niche is that I really get to know all my customers. Sometimes someone will ask me about a book and we'll start emailing about ideas. Maybe they'll never buy the book, but we've almost become friends, because we share this, this joy really for the particular ideas in a book a particular author whatever it might be. And, and I think that's great. I'm not in this to sell books necessarily although that's nice. You know, it's, it's part of it's a community of of passionate. Sometimes mad people, there was a book written a number of years ago. The mind is blanking on the author. But it's called the gentle madness. And it's about sort of the, the madness that is involved in rare objects and rare books and ideas and how, you know, we're not always always governed by by rationality that there are other domains of the self that are far active in the process of buying and selling the books. So it would, it would upset and it would upset Plato greatly to think of the, the horses in charge of the chariot rather than the charioteer but oftentimes it's one of the horses that that's driving the chariot. Oh, there's a tension in Plato too, because yeah, but the divine madness. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, that that maybe it is a divine madness rather than another kind of madness that is at work in the, the gentleness of the madness that that's described in that book. So, but it's nice to come in contact with and to meet people who like yourself people who have just a strong interest and understanding of the ideas and appreciation of the, the sites and sounds and the time and the, the publication is a spot in history that that these books and these ideas and these writers represent, whether a book is sold or not is is insignificant. It's, it's the community one of the things that I really miss in these coven times is the community at the community feeling at these these book fairs. It's on online both in teaching and in book fairs there are now, you know book fairs are virtual book fairs where you don't get to walk around and, you know, see friends of mine who live in Denmark, for example, that I only get to see at the book fairs and, you know, other people that I get to meet at book fairs that is hopefully will return. Once everyone's, I don't know, whatever the world looks like on the other side but it's it's something that I miss is kind of the gathering together of the of those communities. I find teaching online really frustrating I mean advantages. I go, it gives me more, more time I don't have to circle endlessly looking for a parking spot on campus and so forth and I can just roll a bed and teach but. But it's not really the same kind of engaged. Yeah, you just got a bunch of zoom blocks, especially since a lot of them don't show their faces they just blank out so that some of them have genuine privacy concerns others I think just want to be on their phones. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I see that too. And you must do you have large lecture halls. No, fortunately, our classes in the philosophy department tend to be very small so the that's good, the largest classes tend to be about 3035 or so. That's initially required by the fire code although close. Obviously, right right now. No fire code limitation on zoom but right. The administration hasn't figured that out yet. And the, and then our smaller classes, you know in the 10 to 20. Yeah, range for the upper level classes for majors. So, you know, so that's good. I hate it when the, when the class is so big that they that not all the squares will appear on my screen. Yeah, to keep going back and forth between the, which occasionally I get this I do this on my laptop because my. Well, my, my webcam with my regular computer doesn't. In good they were at one time they were compatible and then incompatibility a row. Yeah, I know I struggle with that too because oftentimes I'm doing putting up slides zoom slides, and that results in only some of the students being shown at the top and I have to scroll through and then I realize too late that a student was actually trying to say something in the discussion and it's so then I try to you know close the slideshow but then we don't have the common image in front of us whatever it might be but I'm on the question of teaching I'm curious that philosophy at the pre college level is pretty unusual. Yeah, I got in the beginning of my intro classes I have my students. How many of you had had philosophy in high school, and usually no hands go up a key one or two do so how did that come about. I made it happen to be honest I mean at my, my, I started off teaching ethics. You know, it. My educational background undergraduate degrees and in English religious studies philosophy kind of cobbled together a mix of majors and minors got a master's degree in philosophy and then another one in religious studies and so found myself kind of at that intersection but especially in private schools teaching ethics, and then, you know, a lot of schools have ethics classes a lot of private schools do and then trying to like using that as a way to bring more sort of the rigor of philosophy and actually reading the text and then we'd get, you know, critical massive students that really got interested in in my classes and the ideas that we're covering and so longer that I teach at a school the more and especially in private independent schools you're able to to pitch a class for the subsequent year and get it approved rather quickly independent schools can be quite nimble and responding to the desires of students and, and the expertise of the teachers and so the process is very lengthy and bureaucratic. Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure as it is worse we have managed to, you know, to get a fair number of new courses through so the process works but yeah it just takes time. No private independent high school I could know in February or March. I'm interested in the class I put up a proposal run it through the department run it through the school and we could get it approved for the next year. And sometimes what I do to the longer that I've been teaching 2025 years. The more I can sort of get away with describing a class with broad strokes, and then within that framework be able to pivot and do different things. And that's what I teach to honors seniors right now is philosophy and literature. Well, that's a lot of things, you know, so it's in the English. You don't have to do the same thing every time certainly right right and I and I often don't right but you know it, it, it, it changes, you know, based on the interest of the students I'll put together a longer book list and we won't read all the books or sometimes it'll be, you know, some, some shorter classes that are free public access that that we can read like philosophy text so you know to be able to have a class that is labeled in broad strokes gives me that that room within it. So that I don't have to pitch a new class every year where you know one year it's going to be 19th century Russian literature and all the influences there and other it's going to be, you know, sort of utopia dystopia I don't have to deal with just let's just call it philosophy and literature and then play within that space each year and give a good, you know, mix of philosophy texts and novels and short stories, and it all works. And so that's kind of how I've done it. My friend Bill Shaburg actually Athena rare books was talking about at the beginning, kind of got me into this whole book world, he would often laugh. Whenever we would be talking with someone who was interested in my role as a teacher and bill would just laugh and say, it doesn't matter what Jeff is teaching, at least in the course catalog he's always teaching philosophy. But that's true like I always do would just find ways to introduce, you know, excerpts from Nietzsche texts or Kierkegaard or. I mean the existentialists tend to be the ones that are a little bit more easily integrated into a high school philosophy and literature class. You can do, you can do some of sorts short stories for example the wall I love teaching the wall. They're just a lot. Very well with that piece by Kant on on a supposed right to lie for philanthropic motives because it is sort of the same example that you're you lie about, you know, you lie to the bad guys about where the about where the good guys hiding when it turns out your lies accidentally true. So Kant and Sartre draw different morals and yeah, yeah. The, you know, the moral is you're, you're responsible for the bad results of what you do if what you do is inherently wrong but not the other way to start, you're responsible for anything and everything no matter what. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Maybe I'll include that con as we read the wall this year. If we get around to it because one of the struggles with teaching in the zoom room, and the zoom schedule. I don't know if this is true at the college level but it certainly is at the high school level in order to do these. sort of what's the I'm blanking on the the word for these cohorts right whether students are on campus or off campus you have to have the same group of students and that means that you have to have some classes on some days and some classes on another so um this year or the number of meetings that we have with our students has almost been cut in half so we have so little we have so much less time to get through the work so a lot of the work just isn't covered I usually teach King Lear in my philosophy and literature class um and I I'm pretty sure that's going to be cut I think it's also just partly because I I I imagine it's it's hard to teach Shakespeare in the Zoom room that I think requires a lot of in-person um heavy lifting uh whereas it's it's not not that not that reading Cherny Shevsky's what is to be done, Dostoevsky's notes from underground, Dostoevsky's crime of punishment, and some of the philosophy texts that we'll start into some of the the SART and Camus don't require the heavy lifting but there's something about Shakespeare that is is always difficult to do and and they need a lot of guidance on the you know on the language yeah yeah the editions will have little you know will have little footnotes still a you know they can find it tough going yeah it's often easier to to understand if you're or if you're watching a movie because the a good actor can convey the meaning of it even if you don't literally know what the words mean all of a sudden it's the actual whether deliberately or otherwise convey a different meaning from the from the actual I know I know in Derek Jackie's Hamlet uh he says at one point you know just the breathing time of day with me he says it as though it meant you know it's all one to me I don't care yeah which is not what that phrase means it means it's my exercise time right but it works in the scene I think it's a deliberate choice on this part to uh you know to screw with the language to convey it yeah but anyway the uh he did the important thing is to convey some meaning because if you just you're just saying a bunch of words and the and they are right doing this stuff yeah I think that's a good way to say it right to convey some meaning um to to make a choice um sometimes I'll show oftentimes with King Lear I'll show the um the I think it was in Central Park maybe 1973 James Earl Jones um playing the the role of Lear I think that's a that's a pretty good um version but I think it's also good and I've done this with Macbeth when I used to teach sophomores in a general humanities class and we would read Macbeth but show three or four different movie versions of the same scene and get the students to unpack like why did this version do it this way why did that version do it that way and get to what you said right like ultimately we can disagree but we can clearly see that a choice was made in each of those whether we agree with the choice whether we think it's consistent or inconsistent with the context um a choice was made and that it's not just delivering words that's empty I remember when my mother was taking uh she my mother was getting her college degree at the same time that I was getting my PhD oh exciting uh yeah so um anyway so she was taking this course on Shakespeare film and so I would I would go and see all these Shakespeare films it was really fascinating to see how the you know the same you know the same story would be done very differently depending on where yeah you know uh um Peter Brooks or Cousin Saff for whoever um uh doing it that would you know will enjoy those films um most of the most of the novels that I'm doing in this course have films associated with them but there's no particularly easy way to to show them in a um yeah uh in the zoom session um so I can just tell them about them uh yeah I have I have the trailers for the movies on um on uh on that website so if they uh if they're interested in tracking down the movies they can't they can't a thread I'm also also I'm talking about music I also have clips from Nietzsche's own musical compositions on there oh yeah yeah that's um sometimes that that text pops up at auction every once in a while and I've been tempted I've never I've never owned that um the text itself I think it was published in 1887 um I think it was isn't that hymns of life where Nietzsche wrote the music and didn't um Lou Salome write the the words yeah if thou hast no bliss no now no bliss now left to crown me lead on thou hast they sorrow still yeah I remember discovering discovering those lyrics in college actually um I took a course on Nietzsche and modern literature in college it's I swear it's a remote uh inspirer of the one I'm teaching now even though it didn't do all the same stuff but um right and I don't think I discovered that particular text in in that class but anyway I was sort of on a Nietzsche kick in college yeah it was funny a student of mine a few years ago I don't know we were reading something of Nietzsche and he he came into class and he said that he was talking with his grandfather and his grandfather was really excited excuse me that that he was reading this stuff I think it was excerpts from the gay science and birth of tragedy and some other things that I had the students read um and so I was talking with my student about him and his grandfather and I thought that was great that he was able to connect with his grandfather around these ideas and I started to learn a little bit more about his grandfather's life and his grandfather studied philosophy uh at Princeton and he was a philosophy major and that's one of the reasons why he was so excited that my student his grandson was was reading this stuff and um he said that his grandfather was telling him about his first his freshman year intro to philosophy class and how he was in there and the teacher just came in and wrote Nietzsche in big letters on the front board and he said that that's all that they would be reading that semester and he got really into into it and I said oh who was this professor and he said oh let me I'll go home and I'll ask my grandfather and he came back the next day and he he said oh yeah my grandfather he said that his his professor was was Walter Kaufman and I said I said to my students I said I said Ben look at that book because one of the books I have my students get is Kaufman's existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre which I think is just a great collection of of short pieces and I said close the book whose whose whose name is on the front of that and he said Walter oh my grandfather's teacher was Walter Kaufman this is the book that we have and he suddenly like saw this whole these worlds I was visiting I was visiting at Brown to give a give a well I was it wasn't a lecture I was participating in the workshop but whatever anyway so the the taxi driver who picked me up who was taking me in the brown for some reason he asked my name which taxi drivers usually don't but I said it's Roderick Long he said Roderick he said oh I used to know and I said I was going to this philosophy thing he said oh I used to know a a philosopher named Roderick who taught around here Roderick Roder something Roderick Roderick Chisholm and I said that's one of the most famous philosophers not a lot of philosophy yeah yeah that's so funny he was telling me about how this guy used to play I forget what musical is he played I didn't know about and obviously yeah but you know so this taxi driver happened to know he was like really famous yeah it's funny it's funny when those those those pieces get get put together it's uh yeah my student was funny when he when he recognized that the the teacher that his grandfather was talking about was the guy who put together this book that we were reading yeah and I really like Cuffin's translations even though they're not always as accurate as some of the other ones yeah he really captures the style of feel yeah which is always that's always the tension right I mean I remember reading taking class just on Heidegger's being in time and you know the question of translation and you know it's it's you want to get the one that's kind of clumsy because it gets that that that feel of the of the German rather than some that are that try to nuance it a bit too much I talk about that a lot with my students in reading Dostoevsky and thinking about the different translations and how you know some of the translators try to massage the language a little bit to add variety to the syntax or the diction and it's like no that's not what Dostoevsky was intending you need to have you know I think it's in the the Volokonsky translation where they go back to and notes from underground part one sections like seven and eight where and there's a note about this in the preface but I think it's something like 18 times the word want or wanting appears you know Cotena and how how a lot of English translators try to make the the English version a little bit more stylistically varied by changing some of the wanting to choice to give it some variety and it just didn't it loses that that feel that of the original and so um yeah I think Hoffman kind of keeps a lot of that feel um that other translators don't necessarily yeah some of these translators miss the point for example the um I'm giving it I'm using a different translation of Andrei Gidze moralist this time before I use last time because last time I used the penguin translation which I hadn't read before but it looked all right but there's this you know there's this one line that's very important in that where where um well two different characters say they're different points you can't expect each each one of these people you can't expect each one of them to differ from all the others um which is a pretty literal translation of of the French and also sort of conveys the idea you know the supposed idea I mean it's not you know we're supposed to be rejecting this idea but it's the idea that that being being as individual is some kind of task too difficult to expect anyone to have to live up to and the penguin translation has you can't expect them all to be different yeah it doesn't have the same feel as right you can't expect each one to differ from all the others which is both more literally faithful and captures the idea better and so yeah and so on the basis of that of that just one line I thought I'm not using this translation yeah um and so I I got the new translation which I haven't fully read yet but just that line and that that line is is correct in the in the new translation I'm using I haven't you know I may find something else that uh that displaces me but um but that is but yeah there are some lines that there's no wiggle room like you have to get that line right it's like the you know the it's like the the keystone right if that is not right then then the rest just in some ways falls apart but uh but yeah that's it's it's hard with teaching things in translation um to to get that which sometimes you know I'll dig out you know I won't necessarily bring to my classroom maybe the original first edition of a of a book um to show them the the original german or the original russian or whatever it might be um the original french um although now on the zoom room I can you know kind of hold it up but but to to go back to like how did this become that um you know it's it's like a slightly more intellectual version of the telephone game yeah and of course with the um you know with a lot of I also do a lot of the ancient greek stuff and that's the case where we don't have the you know we don't have the first step in the in the chain we don't have yeah steps in the chain and we know very little about the circumstances of production of the original texts um uh so you know that story that you know that you like to do a following the the text and we we have to sort of we have to sort of pick that up in you know in in medias race um because we don't you know we can't really get back to the uh origin we don't often we don't know the order in which the books were yeah were written we often have good guesses right for many of them but there are always some where you know the some with play dough we've got you know I think there's some good arguments for a ruffle chronological ordering of them but there are some dialogues that you know sort of float around mysteriously where there's some good evidence for it's being late and there's some good evidence for it's being earlier and we don't know and right the ancients didn't care that much because the ancients had this a lot of the ancient readers of play dough had this idea that play dough formed his whole system boom and uh and then everything he wrote was simply something being emitted from the system that was well I mean there were two there were two factions of playness there were the there were the dogmatists who thought that he came up with this whole complete system and then everything he wrote was an expression of this one system and then there were skeptics who thought he had no positive views and he was just casting out on things but the the intermediate view that he had positive views but he hadn't worked out everything and he changed his mind over time which you might think is the most plausible interpretation had very few people yeah I mean all Aristotle who you should know having worked with play dough for 20 years Aristotle makes pretty much makes clear that he thinks play dough changes mind over time but yeah but uh you know because because so many ancient interpreters had this monolithic view of of what play dough was doing right we weren't that interested in the in the chronological sequence and the same thing happened with we with you know with all the other uh big philosophers they were also seen as having some system that you know came out of their heads like you know Athena bursting out of Zeus's head um I don't know why they thought that because they must have known that didn't work with their own in their own case but maybe well I know that's that's the thing it's like these great things must must be somehow different yeah I know because you just think how often do we look at something that we wrote 10 years ago 15 years ago and we just want to distance ourselves from it immediately because that's not what I meant I can't believe I was thinking that at the time and you know to understand the evolution so why would you expect some other you know unless you just see them as a god figure right who just descends and there they are living that perfect life where everything is communicated with precision and accuracy and then they they ascend back to the realm of the gods um you know these but but it's it's it's not um of course you know it'd be very it'd be difficult to take that one with Nietzsche although I'm sure people have but Nietzsche makes you know Nietzsche is quite critical of his earlier yeah widening you know I love one of my favorite and it is one of my favorite books of his but it's the new edition 1886 birth of tragedy and the preface um and I often have my students read that because I think he gives such a good explanation as he as he is attempting to distance the book birth of tragedy from being read through too heavy of a Schopenhauer lens and this um the the pessimism and you know he he proposes quite clearly in just the first few paragraphs of the preface to birth of tragedy um you know sort of separating a pessimism of decline on the one hand and then a naive optimism on the other hand and asserts that what he's doing is this pessimism of strength right like raising that question that and and I often teach that preface as we head into king lear because I think so many of the characters in king lear are in that question that the you know the the question mark of existence life is suffering which I mean the first of the four noble truths of buddhism is right there right that life is suffering what do we do we either um concoct this bulwark that is erected against the truth right that naive optimism or we are so pessimistic that we just give up but is there an opportunity for pessimism of strength where it's not this naive optimism erecting a bulwark against the truth um but it's not giving up in the face of adversity but it's marshaling the courage to live through that that adversity in a way that is is authentic and that that I just think that that's so great because he recognized you know 14 years after birth of tragedy was published in 1872 um how misunderstood it was and and also how his thought had evolved and this gets back to a point that I was making earlier you know having studied niche and read birth of tragedy as a student you just read it right whether it's the penguin edition or whatever edition it is you're not attending as much to 14 year gap between the first edition and the second edition and you're just reading it here's the preface here's the you know but to take that preface looking back 14 years and having him further articulate a more mature thinking on his part but also an evolution of his thinking in a way that is so succinct and so um it just like I said it works beautifully for my students because they can then look at those different options and characters that we then go on to read and then they get to know us because his his niche's attitude to his early writings is not you know it's not like it's utter rejection it's not like right I reject that entirely uh it's so I was more like I I want to direct your attention to the threads in that work that are the root you know are the roots of what I think now yeah and pay less attention to some of things I was distracted by yeah I'm the excessive attention to Wagner and Schopenhauer and so forth but I'm not so much into now uh but uh although you know his wrestling his his wrestling with Wagner is complicated because it was never a complete rejection even when he's a nastiest yeah he has that wonderful line when he says something like uh you know um you know so in the uh in one of the Wagner his works on Wagner he he praises Bizet's Carmen at the expense of Wagner but then somewhere else he says you know I'm only half joking when I when I praise Bizet at the expense of Wagner right right there's probably nothing to say all right so so he's so he's he's he's he's half joking I mean that's not literally what he says but something like that and yeah he's half serious when he praises yeah he's been to Wagner that's you know that's sort of a more interesting than than saying either well I'm still you know completely team Wagner or you know completely team Bizet um you know there's so it's I'm distracted about both of them but it was a Wagner somehow deeper but also somewhere more problematic yeah yeah it's uh it it almost leads you to that you know that that wonderful Nietzsche punctuation choice which is the ellipsis right that it's just I'm gonna I'm gonna to say something that you're gonna have to think about for a while it turns into dashes which is yeah questionable and it um it's it gives a different feel to the style and I think yeah probably you know probably my feeling for Nietzsche is influenced by having Rick Kaufman first and so yeah I always feel the dashes but I know that there really ellipses in the original yeah yeah yeah it's a softer cliffhanger with the ellipsis then I understand why he why Kaufman did it because the ellipsis is such a a common way of expressing in English that something's been left out this is some kind of editorial but I'm sorry that we don't have a way of distinguishing between an ellipse a clear way of distinguishing between ellipsis that's in the original and ellipsis that we the editor have although there's there are a lot of dashes in Nietzsche's original I'm gonna have to go back to my interest as a as a punctuation nerd um you've peaked my interest once sometimes I have my students invent their own forms of punctuation and then um show how they would use that for example I actually had when I was doing that assignment with my high school students I had my kids who were six years old at the time create their own punctuation and I added it to my classroom wall but um but as a punctuation nerd now I kind of want to go back to look at some of the original and take those places where I have seen the ellipsis in the translation and see if maybe there was a dash there instead of the ellipsis in the original and um and uh and try to make sense of that that's uh I reminded of Victor Burgers old routine of reading the punctuation aloud you know yeah you know how that old routine of his yeah the sound effects for all the punctuation I should actually have my students do that add what does that punctuation mark sound like that that'd be fun and then they can present yeah yeah yeah that was a very old routine of his because I my mother remembers why my mother remembered uh when she was living I remembered having seen that routine of his when she was pretty young and then he was still doing it when I was fairly young so uh yeah uh anyway that's a yeah a bit of a digression but well we've we've wandered far field as true philosophers uh tend to do a number of these uh these the bookstore interviews turned out to be about more than just the book yeah and that's fine with me um uh the uh and probably uh you know probably some of the future episodes will you know will be with sort of more normal bookstores and uh and um well I'm proud to be one of the abnormal ones last one I did was with lookbooks LHO OQ uh which is formerly in carlsbad and went up to a story of it maybe coming back and that was also sort of a very unique and unusual bookstore yeah lots of different things um but I'm also I'm also planning to do just normal indie bookstores as well those those interviews will probably be shorter and uh you know maybe less interesting although still I think interesting as a guide to uh the San Diego bookstore scene because I I started this program because as I mentioned I'm a displaced San diegan and yeah and so I sometimes watch San Diego travel videos and see them talking about all these restaurants and beaches and parks and malls and so forth and all good things but they never talk about bookstores and I don't think people will associate San Diego with bookstores they think it's all you know beach life and experience of a lot of interesting bookstores although I'm finding out some really interesting ones I didn't know about like yours uh yours is ones I wouldn't have found casually by uh right wandering around but um uh but anyway um uh you know I'm really glad to get a chance to to find out about yours and about you yeah it was great chatting um I'm gonna have to check out some of your the the stuff you have for your students yeah I will I will say the relevant link I I need to update the um the website first it's uh for one thing I originally made the website all one page which makes it takes it in all the videos on it it takes forever to load so I'm gonna have to break it into different ones for yeah for this class but um but anyway once once I have it ready I'll I'll send you the link and you can uh take a look and yeah definitely well anyway so thanks a lot any any last thoughts yeah thank you no just um thanks for for doing this I think this is a cool um way to to sort of connect number one but also to just highlight some some things that people are doing as you were saying in those the hidden corners of San Diego that you know it's not it's not necessarily the beach scene um although we like to read our books on the beach but it's uh there there are some really interesting um bookshops yeah say that again a cheerful beach read yes yeah yeah all right well it was great to meet you good to talk good to talk books good to talk philosophy and I hope that we keep in touch I will I'll send you some info and we will definitely keep in touch okay thanks a lot bye bye yeah you're welcome thank you bye okay so that's my interview with Jeff Mazzacci of the Eternal Return Bookshop San Diego uh if you want to see more of this kind of thing and like share subscribe all that good stuff um and I'll see you next time