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- [00:02]
A
This is a Headgun podcast.
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B
This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Andrew, There are things in life that you don't want to be transparent. Your swimsuit, your search history, you know, things like that. When it comes to your wireless bill, transparency is everything. That's why Mint Mobile's wireless plans have no gimmicks and no gotchas. Just high speed data, reliable coverage on the T Mobile 5G network. Right now, all plans are 15 per month, even unlimited. You use Mint Mobile and you've switched.
- [00:35]
A
I do. I did. I did. I mean I switched so long ago that I. The memory of my old bad wireless is just like a dim. Like a dim ex lover to me. Like I just don't.
- [00:46]
B
It's.
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A
That's. It's that far in my past and I think that little about going back. Mint Mobile gives you Premium Wireless for 15 bucks a month. All plans come with high speed data, unlimited talk and text. And you can choose from 3, 6 or 12 month plans. And say goodbye to a monthly bill. Craig, you can ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile. Sign up online. Get three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month.
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B
That sounds great. And if it sounds great to you at home, get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. Go to mintmobile.com overdue. That's mintmobile.com overdue. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month@mintmobile.com overdue. That's it. There's no catch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months. Plan required, $15 per taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot capable. Device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com when she said I don't dance now I make money moves, that was a mission statement for a whole new generation. Respect. But that's not the Mount Rushmore. Listen. Cash rules everything around me. When that line dropped, it changed the whole hustle. The greatest tracks are never finished. They're just debated forever. Introducing the sprite living track list. 50 tracks that shape the culture from six decades of hip hop. Scan the QR code on a Sprite or Sprite zero sugar to see the full breakdown. Obey your thirst, Sprite. Hey everybody. Craig here. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison does contain some explicit material that is not appropriate for all audiences. We talk about it a little bit in our opening book banning discussion but we do get into the specifics of the scene, though we do not go into it to full detail as part of our discussion of the book. Please listen accordingly. Thanks and enjoy the show. Hey everybody. Welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.
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A
My name is Andrew. Welcome to the Bluest Guys, our Toni Morrison the Bluest Eye podcast. What if we came up with a name, a different name for our show for every book that we did, Like
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B
a set, like a subtitle, 700 episodes in to come upon this wonderful bit.
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A
We're always innovating and always changing.
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B
Okay, I like this. Welcome to the Bluest Guys. Are we at any risk of.
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A
I don't know if the Blue man group is going to get litigious with us.
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B
Are they?
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A
Cuz I. I think they. They don't advertise themselves as the Bluest Guys, though. They're not the Bluest demand group. They're just a group of blue men.
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B
That is true. Well, they are a group. They are a blue man group. They are a group for blue men.
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A
For Blue Man. Every week one of us reads a book that we've never read before here on our literature podcast. And we talk to each other about it and talk to you about it, and everybody has a time. And Craig, could you tell them again what you read this week for the
- [04:15]
B
podcast, I read Toni Morrison's debut novel, the Bluest Eye. This is not our first time discussing Morrison. Much as Andrew has worked his way through Regency era, I've been slowly working my way through the Morrison canon on this show.
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A
We've got three others that I found. Beloved in episode 158, paradise in episode 402, and Jazz. Jazz episode 635. Craig, did you like jazz?
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B
I did like jazz.
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A
Okay, good.
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B
I'm glad you did though, I think. But I don't recall Jazz as well. Even though I read it the most recently. I don't recall it as well as Beloved or Paradise. Paradise.
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A
Like Beloved and Paradise are like two of her bigger.
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B
Yeah, they're ones.
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A
Blue aside is her first one. Right. The first novel Anyway, published in 1970.
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B
Yeah, correct.
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A
I left most of the Morrison biography stuff to those earlier episodes. She was born in 1931. She died in 2019.
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B
Yep.
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A
Her books are a frequent target of book banners, which we can talk about. I don't know if there's other, like, biography stuff you wanted to pull out at the top of the show as being like, especially relevant to Bluest Eye. But most of what I've got is like book banning stuff, because I have dug in. I found a rabbit hole a little bit.
- [05:39]
B
No, that's kind of what I was hoping. I. This book, you know, it's her. It's her debut novel. I've been wanting to read it for some time. I know that there have been some here in the States, some national book banning bills making, you know, just rummaging around in Congress just like. Just jerk wads. Just been like, what if we meddled with more nonsense that we don't need to meddle with?
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A
Yeah, most of the fun happens at the state level, but yeah, you get some messaging bills still every once in a while.
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B
And so it was kind of on my mind to come back to Morrison, particularly this novel, which I do know, as you'll maybe talk about, is on the top of ALA's challenge lists Year in and year out for the last several decades. Just a little bit about where the book came from. I know kind of thematically we'll cover some of the stuff about beauty and ugliness as the kind of. Some of the core themes relative to racism in the book. But she did. I just like. I found a couple different interviews, one with a great magazine called Interview Magazine, very helpful.
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A
I feel like we've. We must.
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B
I've made that joke before. As I wound up say it, I went, oh. But she was, you know, working at Random House and she was, you know, editing textbooks for another company before that. And she was doing some teaching and was meeting with a writers group in, you know, in New York City. And they were like, well, you can come to this group, but you gotta, like, bring something you wrote kind of, you know, you gotta bring something to the party. And she kind of dusted off this story that she had written about, inspired by a childhood friend of hers, a black girl who had expressed a desire to have blue eyes. More like a little white girl. And she's just interested in what made a person feel that way and was also thinking about, as she embarked on the book, where the 60s were in black literature, particularly black literature by men. You know, kind of championing themes of like, black is beautiful and just like kind of over correcting for racism in a way. And from her perspective of like, well, we can't ignore all the parts of what our experiences have been that are ugly. Like, let's not. Let's not just put things under the rug. And so she writes it. She finally. She got one editor who was like, I like it, but it doesn't have a structure. And she was like, interesting. That's exactly how it needs to be. So. So we'll talk about that.
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A
The version you read also was like that.
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B
I say it. I see what she means, that it does have a structure. But I also. She has. It has a main character, Pecola, but she rarely, if ever is the driver of any of the chapters you read. It's always from, like, somebody else's perspective, that sort of thing. She got her publishing deal with Holt, Reinhardt and Winston, like a thousand copies in the first run. It is not a commercial success or a critical success at all, but it does get picked up, among other places, by the City College of New York, who included it in their freshman curriculum. So at a time when they were making sure that women and black authors were included and kind of from there, as you know, her star rises. It continues to be included in curricula across the country. Which then leads us probably to what Andrew's going to talk about.
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A
Sure. Toni Morrison responded to being, like, challenged and banned a lot, mostly by interpreting correctly that it meant that she had done something worthwhile, that she had, like, challenged something that was worth challenging.
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B
Smart.
- [09:43]
A
Yeah, she did. There's an introduction she wrote in an anthology she edited called Burn this Book about. And she writes in that she says, efforts to censor, starve, regulate and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people. Outlawed languages, flourishing underground essayists, questions challenging authority never being posed. Unstaged plays, canceled films. That thought is a nightmare as the whole universe is being described in invisible ink. And so, yeah, I was. I was just looking. I was looking on the ALA's website. They've got a. Their Office for Intellectual Freedom has this big searchable database of banning attempts in different. Like libraries and school districts. They've got their methodology spelled out. Aila.org is the website the American Library Association. Yes, the American Library Association. And they record 307 documented censorship. Censorship attempts of this book at US schools, libraries and universities. How many of those do you think have happened? I don't know, in the last half decade? Like, what percentage do you think?
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B
60%, maybe?
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A
Yeah, 241 of the 307 have happened between 2021 and 2025.
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B
Oh.
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A
This coincides, of course, with a market uptick in overall banning attempts in the last half decade or so. If you want to think back to the critical race theory mania that was sweeping the nation in the early, early 2000s.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Where, you know, important Congress people would get up and read Dr. Seuss on the floor of the House of Representatives because they were claiming that he was being canceled or whatever. Remember all that? You remember that?
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B
I do. We just, of course, we weren't allowed to go outside. Everyone was just losing their minds.
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A
Everybody was losing their minds.
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B
The racists were getting away with it. They still are.
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A
And we responded. Yeah. By giving all the people who were inciting that power over everything.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So that was. That's fun.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But yes, in 84 of those cases, the Bluest Eye was banned, with a handful of other instances of access being restricted in other ways. And yeah, this is far from a. Far from a settled issue. I think a lot of the time you think of book banning as something that happened in the past, or at least for a long time. That was sort of how I thought
- [12:24]
B
about how it felt when we were kids. When we were kids to ban books.
- [12:28]
A
It's like, yeah, we all, everybody agreed that, like, it's bad when people do this. And the people who try to ban books are the bad guys. Right.
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B
Footloose, where John Lithgow burns books in a trash can. We all know he's evil.
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A
There's a scene in footloose like Fahrenheit 451 was something everybody had to read when we were in like, high school language arts. So, yeah, I thought we had all kind of settled on no book banning being bad. But yeah, of, of all the recent censorship of this, of this book that's happened. Like, there's, there's some. There's a 2022 Time magazine piece I found about like one school board in Florida, one in Missouri that both ban this book or like, take them off the shelves pending a fuller investigation. Like, these aren't works that have been around for 50 years. The Missouri one in particular is advised by this panel of educators who vote 8 to 1 to keep the book in the school district's libraries. Their report said, quote, this novel helps the reader step into and understand 1941, pre World War II, pre civil rights movement, small town black culture in a way no textbook can do. Removing the work would infringe on the rights of parents and students to decide for themselves if they want to read this work of literature. The school board, of course, bans it. But the most ridiculous, I think, I mean, you know, this is. I haven't gone state by state to examine all their book banning laws. But the most ridiculous one I found related to the blue size in Utah where in 2024 they passed a state law that made it so that any book that is banned by at least three of the state school districts or, or by two school districts and five charter schools is automatically banned in every district statewide.
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B
Whoa.
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A
And as what electoral college nonsense is this? It's not even electoral college. It's like electoral college. But like, what if like three medium sized states got to decide everything? Wikipedia says, as of the 2016, 2017 school year, there are 41 school districts in public school districts in Utah. So any three of them can get together.
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B
Wow.
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A
And decide that books are banned. If you look, They've got a SharePoint spreadsheet that records all the, all the titles. A lot of Court of Thorns and Roses books on this. That. So.
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B
Okay. Words. Okay. So we're saying for this book, and this is something that is not unique to the Bluest Eye, it has sexually explicit material in the book.
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A
And I think that is often the pretext for banning. I mean, like Morrison specifically.
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B
But even, even banning, like, you know, we've talked about like any YA book that has romance or particularly queer characters in it.
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A
That's, that's, that's interesting because in. On the Utah State board of education SharePoint spreadsheet that has the 40 books that have been banned under the system does include Looking for Alaska.
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B
Wow.
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A
It does include Wicked, which was banned in January of 2026 for not taking
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the Wicked Witch seriously enough.
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A
Well, I think it's probably for the butt stuff mostly, but also because those movies had just come out and I assume there's a lot of different. There was a lot of attention.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And then, yeah, the Bluest Eye was banned in April. Just, just April of this year, this book was banned in Utah. And yeah, if you look at the, like, the spreadsheet has a list of the districts that banned it and like, prompted it to be banned statewide. And the school district of Davis is on almost every single one of them. The school district of Washington is on most of them. It just gives so few districts this really outsize. And these, you know, these aren't like teeny, tiny little school districts. They're fairly large in the state. They're not the biggest, but they're probably like top five, top 10 in terms of student body. But yeah, it gives them kind of outsized influence over what everybody else gets to do. And so give. You know, given the schema, I'm kind of surprised there are only 40 books on this after, after two years. But yeah. Between August of 2024 and now, 40 books have been banned by Utah under this law.
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B
No, thank you.
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A
Blue aside, I'm just gonna drop, just drop this SharePoint link. There's a graphic novel of the Handmaid's Tale that was, that was banned. 13 reasons why was banned.
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B
Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.
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A
I'm not, I don't see anything else that's jumping out at me as particularly hilarious.
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B
Well, yeah, I mean, none of it's hilarious.
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A
No, I mean hilarious in terms of like. Yeah, just, just thinking about like very serious red faced school board guys like being upset about like a bunch of Court of Thorns and Roses books. There is something that strikes me funny about that.
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B
I, I did find an article on the PBS's website, Public Broadcasting System. Is that what it's called?
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A
I don't know. Service system. I'll look it up.
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B
Look it up. And they have an article like a series called the American Experience. They have an article called Band the Bluest Eye where they talk.
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A
I did see this.
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B
Yeah. The challenges and you know, sexually explicit material, graphic descriptions and disturbing language. An underlying socialist communist agenda. I don't. Okay, so you can look for, you
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A
could look for that. You can find that stuff wherever you're looking.
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B
Find that wherever you want.
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A
And, and it's because they're. And because people are secretly putting it in everywhere. Everywhere. Secret communists got to find everywhere.
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B
You've got to read the book backwards.
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A
Important thing is that you be scared of them always and that you buy gold and vitamin supplements.
- [18:20]
B
Yeah. They interview a teacher, Shakima Silvery, who is an educator in Atlanta, Georgia, won awards for her work in the classroom and talks about teaching this book as a black woman herself and as a way to interrogate her own childhood and notions of beauty and to like give kids a way to metabolize this notion of like the, the doll test where the psychologist has children just look at dolls and decide which one is ugly and pretty. And you know, folks have had done that with white dolls and black dolls and you know, had all sorts of zany results. And she also talks about.
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A
Zany is the word I would have.
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B
Unfortunate, perhaps disappointing. There you go. And also just talks about teaching the book as a way for kids to see that they are not alone. This book has abuse in it. This book has explicit scenes in it and that kids have come forward to her, you know, sharing their own experiences. That's very important. I think that is, as you said, like, that is why this book is likely to get banned. Not because no one would say out loud, or maybe some people have they, but the banners are often not going to say out loud. We are banning this because it is about the black experience in America by, you know, one of the most prominent black authors in the history of the country. And we are not banning it because it is about a young woman's experience. We're banning it because there's graphic depictions of stuff that kids shouldn't read. Nobody, you know, nobody should read this. And it's like, well, we're not saying that 6 year olds should read it. And almost every teacher in the articles that I read would be like, willing to put a con, even a notional content warning on a syllabus and just be like, hey, this is what the book's about. So we'll talk a little bit. When we talk about the book, I think I have some thoughts on why it is like what you could get out of this text as a teen I think is interesting. Like if you're reading this in high school or at least just as a young person, whether or not it's, you know, you're coming to a little bit later than that because it does center
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A
on what, like us young people?
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B
Yeah, we're young people.
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A
Young, young hit people like us, the bluest guys.
- [20:48]
B
Yes, it does center on, you know, mostly either children or young people and their experiences in this town. And so I think that's something that, you know, a teen in school would read it and, and while they might not have had the experience of the characters in the book, there's. They're not reading about some like, you know, the work of literature about a 40 year old white guy from 60 years ago, you know, that sort of thing. Okay, I guess we should take a break.
- [21:21]
A
We should take a break and then
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B
I can tell you about the Bluest Eye.
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A
Okay, I'm going to ban you and me until after the break. Then I'll unban us.
- [21:31]
B
Don't shadow ban me,
- [21:43]
A
Craig. I know you like to keep your rights private, but I know there are other things that you want to make public and there's no way to take something public like making a great website with Squarespace. That's right. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Craig, you heard of these guys?
- [21:57]
B
I have, but I'm not quite sure the best way to make myself public. Is that what I just, I want.
- [22:06]
A
It's the best way to take you take your ideas public, to just kind of present your, the things you're thinking about to the Public.
- [22:13]
B
So you're talking about taking my ideas out on the information superhighway?
- [22:17]
A
Yes.
- [22:19]
B
I don't know how to drive an Internet car. Can Squarespace help?
- [22:23]
A
Squarespace is the. They give you the car and a driver and a road and destination and a starting point. Squarespace gives it all to you.
- [22:33]
B
Okay.
- [22:34]
A
They're the website that helps you make websites. Here's some things that we like about Squarespace. Yeah, they have cutting edge design credit.
- [22:39]
B
Ow. Ouch.
- [22:41]
A
Finger ouch. Charlie. With Squarespace's collection of cutting edge design tools, anyone can build a beautiful professional online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business. No matter where you start, your website is flexible to what you need with intuitive drag and drop editing, beautiful styling options, unrivaled visual design effects, and more ways to list what you offer. No experience required. You can fundraise directly on your website and grow your impact with built in donation tools as well. Create a professional on brand website that makes it easy to accept one time or recurring contributions and engage supporters. And also, Craig, Squarespace makes it easy to showcase your expertise with video content on your website, upload and organize your videos, create stunning video libraries, and even monetize your content by adding a paywall. Perfect for online courses, exclusive tutorials and premium workshops. If any of this sounds good, if you want to take all this stuff public, you can go to squarespace.com overdue for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code overdue to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, squarespace.com overdue for a free trial and offer code overdue to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Craig, you want to talk to me about the bluest eye, but I want to talk to you about the biggest offer that you are going to get on making a great website with Squarespace. Yes. This podcast this week is brought to you by Squarespace. It's a website that helps you make websites and they make it easy and they make it so you don't have to know how to code. And all the other stuff that we liked about Squarespace for many, many years. What?
- [24:16]
B
Love easy things that don't make me know how to do things. Do you use them?
- [24:23]
A
Yeah, it's great.
- [24:24]
B
I love them. I love Squarespace.
- [24:28]
A
We've used Squarespace for many years. Here are some of the things that we like about them beyond their beautiful designs and 24. 7 customer support and all the other stuff. Craig With Squarespace's collection of cutting edge design tools Anyone, even you can build a beautiful professional online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business. No matter where you start, your website is flexible to what you need. No experience. You can also fundraise directly on your website and grow your impact with built in donation tools. Create a professional on brand website that makes it easy to accept one time or recurring contributions and engage supporters. Craig, you know the moving pictures that are so big today? Squarespace makes it easy to showcase your expertise with video content on your website, upload and organize your videos, create stunning video libraries and even monetize your content by adding a paywall. Perfect for online courses and exclusive tutorials and premium workshops.
- [25:26]
B
Exclusive tutorials.
- [25:27]
A
Exclusive tutorials.
- [25:28]
B
No one else can learn how to do this.
- [25:30]
A
Yeah, all the best talk stuff you can learn how to do a talkies goes up on Squarespace. If all this sounds good to you, Craig, you can go to squarespace.com overdue for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code overdue to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Offer code overdue to save 10% off your first purchase of a Squarespace website or domain.
- [26:02]
B
Andrew, where do you want me to start with this one?
- [26:07]
A
I almost always just say the beginning. But what I mean it's. You said it that the structure is sure unconventional. You. I mean, so is it easier than to begin with a discussion of themes and then work our way backwards to plots or. Yeah, let's try that attack is gonna be.
- [26:31]
B
I always say I wanna do that and then I always have trouble. So just help me out. Let's try to do that. Okay.
- [26:35]
A
Okay, so themes. I mean, like what's a number of themes that you think that we should get through before we start talking about other stuff?
- [26:44]
B
Like what are the big three?
- [26:46]
A
Big three themes.
- [26:47]
B
All right, say there are three big themes.
- [26:50]
A
Number two will amaze you.
- [26:55]
B
The first one is beauty and ugliness. It's what Morrison said she was interested in writing about when she started embarking on this story. And it presents itself in a number of ways. We get this. The. The main family that we are going to follow throughout the book is the Breedloves. And the main character is Pakota. Breedlove or Pecola. Excuse me? Pecola. Breedlove.
- [27:26]
A
Yes, Pecola.
- [27:27]
B
Her mother, Pauline or Polly. Her dad, Charlie, Sammy. And she also has another sibling whose name I'm forgetting right now. But they are, you know, living together or. No, she doesn't have another sibling. That's the other girls. And they are like ugly. The book says so. They live in Lorraine, Ohio, where Morrison was from, in a black community in Lorraine. Some of the characters are from the south and remark upon the difference in their treatment by white folk up north that they are less. They're a little bit more ambiguous with their racism. Like there's a veneer in front of it. It's a little harder to pin down, man.
- [28:21]
A
I had. My aunt was married to somebody who was from Georgia and his family would come up to visit sometimes and would spend the whole time calling all of us Yankees.
- [28:33]
B
And it was very.
- [28:34]
A
It was very weird. That is my experience with.
- [28:39]
B
Yeah, sure. And so. And I don't believe. I think this is. Yeah, the Breedloves do come from the south and so there is some of that going on. But this is what the book says about them. You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly. You looked closely and could not find the source. This is after a passage kind of giving some of their physical description. Then you realize that it came from conviction. Their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear. And they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, you are ugly people. They had looked about. They had looked about themselves, saw nothing to contradict the statement, saw in fact support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. Yes, they had said, you are right. And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them and went about the world with it. They are all ostracized in their ways from their community. They don't seem to have people.
- [29:46]
A
Is this still on the theme of ugliness? And just make sure we're.
- [29:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they are.
- [29:51]
A
Don't yet let your themes bleed all the time. I know, but when you feel like we're decisively shifting from. From one theme to the next, you can just stop and see what the next theme is.
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B
Okay. That's a tease of another theme of communities and ostrich. Yep, that one.
- [30:09]
A
Ostrichisation. Everybody turns into ostriches.
- [30:14]
B
It's a forgotten Ionesco play. And so the Breedloves have this kind of ugliness value that they have all ascribed themselves. And some of them, particularly in Cholli Morrison writes it as like, he is also ugly in action. He is a drunkard. He is, you know, does not run around on his wife as much as I think he maybe used to. But not great about that either. Pauline has taken like she was at a young Age had her foot like mangled and has kind of a not quite drop foot, but some. Some kind of injury to her foot that has left it deformed for the rest of her life.
- [31:04]
A
Okay.
- [31:05]
B
And so again, not going to talk about ostracization yet, but she, in Charlie finds a life with him and then like, he is so repugnant. She does not fit in. She does adopt kind of an intense religiosity and martyrdom. She could leave him, maybe that might make her life better, even though that they have two kids. But instead she can now, in a way that the book describes as kind of ugly moral behavior, claim the high road and almost have him be like a sin eater for her where she is always suffering at her drunkard husband and they're always fighting with each other and she doesn't really like her kids anyway. And so she, in her way, is somewhat repugnant or at least behaves in a way. Again, like, it's a lot of the book and Morrison writing in such way that like, I don't actually know if they are supposed to be physically abhorrent, truly. Right. And that's not the point. It is that they are perceived as such. They perceive themselves as such. And that creates a dangerous spiral. Then there's like a concentric circle out of the black community in which they live where there are young black boys teasing Pecola at school by calling her black. And it's like, okay, yes, she's dark skinned. Is she darker than you? The book isn't even really going into overt colorism, though that's certainly written in there. The two girls in the McTeer family, Frieda and Claudia. Claudia is like a narrator character that we get throughout the book intermittently. And there's an early chapter where Pecola has come to live with the McTeers because Charlie burnt their house down. Burnt the Breedlove's house down. Well, good.
- [33:15]
A
Shouldn't have known that.
- [33:17]
B
And until they get a new place to live, Pecola is going to stay with the McTeers. And there's this bit where Frieda and Pecola, like Shirley Temple and Claudia, hates her whole deal. Claudia does not like little white dolls and little white girls. And we'll go so far as to, rather than mother a doll that she is given, she will just destroy them and tear them apart. And she says to I destroyed white baby dolls. But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white Girls. The indifference with which I would have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so, to discover what eluded me, the secret of the magic they weaved on others, what made people look at them and say, aw, but not for me. The eye slide of black women as they approach them on the street and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them. Okay, so that's another thing is like this notion of white beauty, particularly for little girls, comes up again later in the book when we see Mrs. Breedlove, Pauline, Paul, Paulie, who works for a white family across town, and Pecola and Frida and Claudia all show up there at some point. And Mrs. Breedlove's like, okay, I guess you're here. You could walk home with my daughter, that would be fine. Please leave. And the little white girl that she takes care of comes in. Pecola knocks up high over and makes a big mess. And her mom acts like she, you know, has destroyed her and almost killed this little white girl. And the. There's a thing where even Pecola has to call her mom Mrs. Breedlove. And here is this little white girl calling her Polly and being fawned over by her, and this very severe, authoritative woman is subjugating herself to this, you know, little six year old white girl or whatever.
- [35:20]
A
Sure.
- [35:22]
B
And that. That is just kind of the standard by which all these characters are operating in both literal, physical, but also kind of moral and character ugliness and beauty. And the book is pretty clear that it's a. We all create this together. Like. Yeah, none of this is like, there's not an objective scorecard. This is effectively. I don't know, I try to spare you baseball sometimes, Andrew.
- [35:53]
A
You don't have to spare me baseball. I'm just. You just have to be ready for the blank looks that. Yeah, you're occasionally gonna get.
- [35:59]
B
But you know how there are some stats that are real? Like a guy hit a home run.
- [36:04]
A
Yes.
- [36:04]
B
Right. Did how many home runs? Right.
- [36:07]
A
Yeah.
- [36:07]
B
There are also the advanced stats that are like wins above replacement.
- [36:12]
A
That are the Moneyball stats.
- [36:15]
B
Well, that's even. No, this is even beyond that because this is like a particular website's proprietary formula for how many wins a guy gave his team relative to a fi. A fictitious metric for an average player.
- [36:32]
A
I think I know about this, but mostly via politics.
- [36:36]
B
Yeah.
- [36:36]
A
Yes, I'm familiar with it. And that is replacement level politician.
- [36:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [36:42]
A
And that's primarily because all of the guys who made baseball like this then decided to start doing politics.
- [36:49]
B
What What I'm saying is, is that the, like the notions of beauty and a beautiful life and whatever. Because even like Pauline's, she has romantic notions of beauty that she gets from going to watch movies, you know, and things like that.
- [37:04]
A
Yeah.
- [37:06]
B
It's. It's not real. And it is a standard that is kind of co created and is always being perpetuated and co created by the communities we live in. That's what Morrison is saying. Right.
- [37:18]
A
Okay.
- [37:20]
B
And I think.
- [37:21]
A
Are we still on theme number one?
- [37:22]
B
We're still on theme number one, but I'm like covering some scenes that I don't have to talk about later, so that's fine.
- [37:26]
A
I mean, we can also do. Just keep your big three themes in mind as a North Star to sort of organize your discussion of stuff. I'm just saying if we do every theme in this much detail, that'll be the episode maybe. And then we. Okay, that's. Okay, good. I was making sure that was the thing and not like. Okay, now having covered my three themes, I have 25 more minutes of stuff to talk.
- [37:49]
B
No, it gives me. It gives me like, you know, the, the license to speed run the plot a bit.
- [37:53]
A
Okay, awesome. Can you tell me what the other two themes are so I know when to. When we've switched?
- [37:58]
B
Yeah. I think the other two themes are like community and family.
- [38:05]
A
Yes.
- [38:06]
B
And it's not even a theme. She has a motif of soil and seeds in the book that I think gets to larger thoughts that you maybe could call a theme. But I'll start with the soil and seed stuff. But.
- [38:22]
A
Okay.
- [38:22]
B
Communities and ostriches.
- [38:25]
A
You got to pick a different word.
- [38:26]
B
I don't even know if it's a word.
- [38:28]
A
Exclusion.
- [38:29]
B
Community is an exclusion.
- [38:32]
A
You got me doing.
- [38:33]
B
I don't know if it's a word.
- [38:35]
A
Communities and the condition of having been ostracized.
- [38:38]
B
Yeah, there you go.
- [38:41]
A
So
- [38:43]
B
they live in this town. Right. And the, the ostracization. Huh. And some of it is like, you know, it's internal self perpetuating. We meet and I would lump the way that families are depicted in this book under this theme.
- [39:02]
A
The community theme.
- [39:03]
B
Yeah. Because we, when we meet the McTeers, like we are getting Claudia, who is like, she's not feeling very good and her mom is like taking care of her. Right. And it's just such a shark contrast to the way that Paulie and the Breedloves behave with one another.
- [39:21]
A
Okay.
- [39:21]
B
We also get. For every person we meet in this kind of constellation of, of Lorraine, Ohio, there's always a Backstory. And that I think is part of Morrison's approach to telling Piccolo's story. That is like, meant to reinforce this. Like, it's almost like reverse. It takes a village in the same way that it, like, it takes a village to, you know, as the idiom goes, to like raise a kid or do whatever. It also takes a village to destroy Pecola. Breedlove, I think, is kind of what Morrison is doing here. Where there are. There's like a. In this town, there is a border. Mr. Henry, who comes to live in the McTeers boarding house and he seems fine until he's not. And spending time with sex workers and ooh, that's a scandal. And then we never go visit them. Frida and Claudia are so terrified of these sex workers, even though they are the only people who are ever kind to Pecola, wouldn't, you know, and like, actually interact with her like she's a human being. Mr. Henry does some untoward, lewd things in Frida's presence. Not good. Don't love that.
- [40:40]
A
Sure.
- [40:41]
B
We get. We get rid of him. There is a guy that we meet at the end of the book called Soap Head Church. We don't like Mr. Church. He is. He is an interesting figure who is also a misanthrope, a self professed misanthrope who just can't stand other people. He's also a pervert, which is neat.
- [41:06]
A
Nice. Yeah.
- [41:06]
B
Because he can't stand other people. But he does have yearnings and so he kind of has to whittle down what types of people he can bear to spend time with with those yearnings. And it's. It's illegal. It's bad.
- [41:21]
A
Sure. Yeah.
- [41:22]
B
But he has come to Lorain, Ohio. He is a man of West Indian descent and is gone off to college and is well educated and thus can speak very intelligently about how you might marry up in the racial hierarchy such that you can retain power yourself and cite all sorts of literary. Make all sorts of literary references that kind of dress up a very gross moral compass. Right. He is also now a charlatan. He was. He had all sorts of odd jobs and now he's here operating a psychic parlor. That becomes part of Pecola's downfall late in the book. And he writes letters to God about how he is the one who is actually helping people because God has set up this world. That is so terrible.
- [42:14]
A
Okay, yeah.
- [42:15]
B
Not a great guy.
- [42:16]
A
Sure.
- [42:16]
B
And I don't. I don't want to lump him under the, like the tragedy of exclusion, but more that. That Morrison has everyone from kind of these awful people tucked away in corners of this town committing heinous crimes to, you know, people who have been ostracized through their choice of work or the work that they've been able to find as sex workers, to just. Yeah. Children on the school grounds, just mocking each other, driving each other apart, making no one feel comfortable, that sort of thing. Okay, there's. There's more to that, but I think the. The basic thing that this book is not basic. The primary thing that this book is lobbing at you from the community angle is that, like, when the tragedy that befalls Pecola happens, we get kind of. Do you remember, I don't know, the last time you did or encountered the Scrooge story at all, whatever version of Christmas.
- [43:25]
A
Muppet Christmas Carol? Yeah.
- [43:26]
B
Yeah.
- [43:29]
A
That was the last version.
- [43:30]
B
I don't remember how it's done in Muppet Christmas Carol, but there is a. Like, in the third phase with the third ghost, there's like, a sequence where Scrooge is, like, listening to everybody talk about him. Yeah. And it's kind of like, wow, nobody liked him. That sort of.
- [43:45]
A
Yeah, nobody liked that. Nobody liked that guy who. I don't know. I mean, why. Yeah, you're. You're making me hear people talk about somebody who was just like me and how it would be received if they died. Weird. Thank you, spirit. Thank you for doing this.
- [44:00]
B
Yes, that part. Yes, yes. There is a section where Frieda in
- [44:05]
A
Muppet Christmas Carol, it's a spider who is talking to people, like, under the bridge and, like, buying his bed sheets and stuff.
- [44:14]
B
Claudia and Frieda are hearing members of the Lorraine community talk very openly about what has happened to Pecola, and I'll go through a version of what happens to her by the end of this episode. But they speak with such condescension to what has happened to her instead of any level of compassion, like, it is a tragedy has befallen this family, and everyone in town goes, wow. Yeah, that's sad.
- [44:41]
A
Yeah.
- [44:41]
B
Oh, boy. Don't want to deal with that. Wow, that's awful. You see? Did you hear what happened? And they're willing to discuss it in as much detail as they know, but they will not step in. Yeah, right. So this brings us to our last theme here.
- [44:58]
A
Thing.
- [44:59]
B
Seeds and soil.
- [45:00]
A
There's in soil. There's soil. Is the same. Yeah, it's the same thing twice.
- [45:06]
B
Is this. You're fair enough. There's this opening image, which is how you learn very early in the book that what is going to happen to Pecola that she is unfortunately going to be raped by her dad. Where the girls, Claudia and Frida, say that they tried to plant their own seeds in the ground, just like her dad planted a seed to try and help her. To help her. You know, what they ultimately do at the end of the book is they have been waiting to sell seeds in their community to save up money to buy a bike, and they're hearing what has happened to Pecola. It's so terrible that they're like, well, maybe if we didn't use those seeds to make money, we could plant them in the ground, grow something beautiful, make this town actually a place where things grow and flourish, and maybe that will help Pecola's baby survive. Even though no one in this town wants Pecola's baby to live, it doesn't work. The flowers do not grow. They do not flourish. And this kind of what you plant is what you get is kind of the theme here. I think Morrison's after it sounds reductive, to put it so bluntly, because she is spending a lot of time writing it way more beautifully than I could say it. Yeah, but you. It's like a building block of, as a kid, of your understanding of the world. And she does drop into that sometimes where, like, girls will discuss their periods or they'll discuss where a baby comes from with kind of, like, just enough knowledge to be close. But also, it's clear they don't have the full picture. And that's something Morrison's playing with.
- [46:49]
A
How does it feel about, like, how you. What you plan is, what you get. Given that the whole, like, ugliness theme is. Is dealing with how this. This perception is created and may or may not actually, like, reflect reality or be, like, fair to anybody. Like, how are those ideas kind of interfacing with?
- [47:08]
B
I think it is that the actions you take upon that perception are what's creating the soil in which you're planting stuff like how you're behaving, how you are acting upon that perception of ugliness is what is depriving the soil of. Of to extend the metaphor, making it, like, infertile for anything beautiful to grow. I think what is interesting about the soil seed stuff is that it is like, an interesting metaphor by which you could introduce somebody to concepts of, like, systemic harm and racism. Like, it is a different metaphor for community because it is like the ground and nature and things like that. It is not like, oh, the web of people in the town. And it is also like a basic building block of Science knowledge that, like, kids are taught in school. Like that sort of thing.
- [48:06]
A
Yeah.
- [48:06]
B
Which then jumps to, this is not a theme. But, Andrew, did you know that there's a whole bunch of Dick and Jane stuff in this book?
- [48:17]
A
I. Yes. So I had read that the chapter. It's like, chapter titles are. Are using Jane stuff sort of in
- [48:25]
B
a weird, sort of very weird way.
- [48:27]
A
So the opening of the book. Tell me what. Give me more.
- [48:30]
B
The opening of the book has, like, what I think are just straight quotes from Dick and Jane. Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family.
- [48:43]
A
As we discovered when we read our Dick and Jane episode like these, the books have morphed and changed a lot over time. And whatever specific edition that Morrison is referencing might not be something that is currently, like, actively available to buy.
- [48:57]
B
But she's got, like, a specific paragraph that runs from, like, here is the house through, see father. He is big and strong. See the dog. Do you want to play with Jane? See the dog run? That kind of thing. Yeah. The next paragraph is the same text, but all of the punctuation is removed. All the letters are lowercase. It's, like, very Cummings in there.
- [49:21]
A
Okay.
- [49:21]
B
And then. And then the next paragraph, it is. All the spaces are removed. Words are repeating each other. It's, like, almost impossible to read. And then snippets of that become the various chapter heads where you'll just go, like, randomly in the book. I'm just going to try to find a chapter head and it will be, oh, that one didn't have it. That's weird.
- [49:48]
A
Okay.
- [49:48]
B
What is she doing there? Why does Winter not start with one? Because the book takes place over a year. There are four seasons in a year, as we all know.
- [49:54]
A
Yeah, we all know that.
- [49:56]
B
Oh, this one. See the cat? It goes, meow, meow, Come and play. Come play with Jane. The kitten will not play, play, play. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like all caps. It feels very purposefully like, whoa. Yeah, I don't like something.
- [50:12]
A
Something's falling apart here.
- [50:14]
B
And that is. I know that Morrison is interested in, like, this is what we were given to read as kids, as little black kids. It does not reflect our lived reality. Here I am to write a version of what my lived reality was as a kid, as a black kid in Ohio. And she's kind of very literally deconstructing these Dick and Jane passages. And I do think that that is kind of like. It's not an overt connection. The book is making. But I do think it's part and parcel with the like, how do these kids learn about the world they're in? How do they. What sense are they able to make out of the beauty and ugliness and racism? And what tools are they being given? And what tools are they not being given at all?
- [51:06]
A
Sure.
- [51:08]
B
The plot stuff that I haven't covered. And this might kind of take us to the end. Andrew.
- [51:13]
A
Okay.
- [51:13]
B
Is like. The book is divided into four seasons. There's little vignettes in each of them for almost all of them. As I said, Pecola is a character, but never. We're rarely getting it, if ever getting anything from her perspective.
- [51:31]
A
Sure.
- [51:31]
B
So there's always this, like. I think Morrison probably never wrote a draft this way. But I imagine a number of authors could have written a draft of this novel that is like, here's a buildings Roman about terrible things that happened to Pecola.
- [51:44]
A
Yeah.
- [51:44]
B
And it would just not do what this book is thematically trying to do. There's snippets where she is spending time with the McTeer girls, where they interact with the three sex worker women, where they interact with a new girl at school who's clearly pretty and, well, often popular. And then like pretends to be nice to them and then runs away calling them all ugly. There's this whole middle vignette that takes a look at other characters coming up from the south and is more. Seems like a meditation on how women coming nor black women coming north from the south. Like a build a little fiefdom of control because they have to in their family unit. But their men also don't satisfy them. And then it leads to that, like this particular woman raising a son that hates her. And then that son enacts violence on Pecola. So that's fun. And then in spring, we get the two longest vignettes. One is Polly's background, where we learn about how she was ostracized as a kid because of her deformity, her foot. And then how she meets Charlie. They move to Ohio. She doesn't fit in with anyone. She loses a tooth, which she's upset about. But then she, you know, becomes this kind of martyr character to take control of. Of her own life and finds a lot of value working for these white people where she can organize their home and there's nothing organized in her life, that sort of thing. And then we get Charlie's background. The longest vignette in the book. He was four days old when his mother wrapped him in blankets and left him in a junk keep. And he was raised by his aunt who died when he was a young teenager. And at. At her funeral banquet, he, like, runs off with two girls and another guy, like, out into the woods, and he's like, making out with his girlfriend in the woods. And then, like, two white hunters come up upon them, and you're like, how could this go bad? So it could go bad so many ways. And they don't do anything to them. They just make them keep going, rather, and watch. And it's awful and it's terrible. And Cholli leaves town because he thinks that maybe he got his girlfriend pregnant and he has to leave. He's never known who his father is. He goes and meets his father in a dice game in Macon, Georgia, and he's like, I think I'm your son. And the guy's like, go away. I have dice to play. And he reaches this point and this is like. It's an interesting thing that Morrison sets up when we finally learn about Charlie. And I think this is kind of what the. With none of this is told from Pecola's perspective affords her. Where now we get to. He is going to do something awful. We know this from the beginning of the book.
- [54:53]
A
Yeah.
- [54:53]
B
And so her, you know, the challenge she sets for herself is whether or not we are going to find ourselves sympathetic to Charlie. Can we. What can we learn about his circumstances? Right. And I also think you said something to me about this book before we started recording. I think some of this colorism and ugliness. Beautyness, Beautiness.
- [55:14]
A
Yeah. Beauty. Ostrich size for my beauty. Ness
- [55:22]
B
Morrison has laid a lot of ground that we have read other authors who have then, you know, played in that space. Right. Have covered some of these same themes. So I do think that there's some of discussion of this book where you're like, oh, I've read books that have talked about this. Right. Where. Where they have had a character do something awful like this. And yet I am now also going to get their backstory where I at least go. Hmm, that's interesting.
- [55:48]
A
Yeah, sure.
- [55:50]
B
So the. But the way she puts it, I think is really is going to stay with me. She writes about Charlie feeling dangerously free. Free because he has literally no one in his life now free to feel whatever he felt. Free to be tender or violent, to whistle or weep. Free to sleep in doorways or between the white sheets of a singing woman. Free to take a job, free to leave it. He could go to jail and not feel imprisoned, for he had already seen the furtiveness in the eyes of his jailer. Free to say, no, sir, and smile, for he had already killed three white men. Free to take a woman's insults, for his body had already conquered hers. Free even to knock her in the head, for he had already cradled that head in his arms. Free to be gentle when she was sick or mop her floor, for she knew what and where his maleness was. Charlie was truly free, abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father. There was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him. I don't want to reduce Morrison so far as to say she's like, he. He is. He has no responsibility for what he does. I don't think that she's saying that, but she is interested to point out, you know, how could a guy get this way? How could a guy live his life so untethered such that he would do what he does to Pecola? Right. Had he not been alone in the world, she writes, since he was 13, knowing only a dying old woman who felt responsible for him, but whose age, sex and interests were so remote from his own, he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children. As it was, he. He reacted to them, and his reactions were based on what he felt at the moment. This book is a hard book to read as a father.
- [57:43]
A
Like, thematically, thematically. And reading not just because your kid is bugging you so much, in trouble, sitting and reading it.
- [57:52]
B
No, it is hard to read based on what Cholly does to Pecola and to think about, you know, when he comes in, in his drunkenness, and he takes advantage of her and abuses her, and he is, in his twisted mind and morality, oscillating from hatred to pity to love.
- [58:13]
A
Yeah.
- [58:14]
B
And it. There's tenderness in it from his perspective, which is abhorrent. And he's just like. It's awful.
- [58:21]
A
Yeah.
- [58:23]
B
And that's. I think that just that scene alone is one of the reasons this book gets banned all the time. And it is the bot. It is not the byproduct. It is a culmination of the ugliness that the book has been exploring. And all of the. It's interesting the way you think about the. Like, the book has so many women who are perpetuating this beauty and ugliness dynamic, and then it, like, builds and boils over with Charlie, and then, like, that creates this kind of mental break that happens with Pecola. So, like, the end of her story is Going to this soped church guy, asking him to help her get blue eyes, appealing to God or whatever, and he has her, like, kill a dog or something with poison for him and says, well, if the dog reacts weird, then God will grant you your wish. And she's like, okay, I guess. And then it happens and a dog dies and she has a mental break such that we get a whole chapter from. This is the chapter we get from her perspective. And it is a full, like, split personality dialog.
- [59:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, because that would be. You would want to be. If you had a whole book be about somebody but not have them be centered and then you wanted to center them. Yeah. You're probably planning, like, a big, like, not explosive, but, like, adventurous, like, jarring sort of stylistic.
- [60:07]
B
It is powerful that the longest time. That's a good word you spend with Pecola is her talking to some version of herself where she believes that this transformation of her eyes has happened and that all of the people in town who won't look at her and won't let her go to school and are not treating her correctly are because they're jealous of her beautiful blue eyes and that that is where she lives her life now. And then you get the kind of. The full version of the girls trying to plant the seeds and growing, and it doesn't work. And the community just kind of abandons Pecola to her madness, as it were. And man, Morrison will hit you with language that is like, you learn the baby did not survive. The girls don't really know what to do with Percola. And she just drops a sentence like, and the years folded up like pocket handkerchiefs. And you're like, tony, I have a number of notes on my edition of the book that are just me going, tony,
- [61:16]
A
I just. I just think it's. You keep bringing these. These sort of similes to the podcast. Like, oh, the years folded up like tanker ships. Oh, he did a fart like a baked bean fart. Like ripping a bed sheet in half. Like, you just. You keep finding these little snippets of beautiful language.
- [61:33]
B
These very talented.
- [61:35]
A
Yeah.
- [61:36]
B
Yes, exactly. Like the baked bean fart is when we are in the Sop Head Church chapter and he's talking about the one woman that he might have been with that he did get married to. Man, this book is written so well. She found his fastidiousness and complete lack of humor touching and long to introduce him to the idea of delight. He resisted the introduction, but she married him anyway, only to discover that he was suffering from and enjoying an Invincible melancholy. When she learned two months into the marriage how important his melancholy was to him, that he was very interested in altering her joy to a more academic gloom, she simply left. She had not lived by the sea all those years, listened to the wharfman songs all that time to spend her life in the soundless cave of Elihu's mind.
- [62:25]
A
What nice.
- [62:27]
B
And then he later writes in his letter to God that she left him the way that people leave a hotel room, which is like, oh, my God. This book is very good. It's very sad and graphic and it has to be to be the level of tragic that it's operating on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. As I said before the break, I could see why you might not want to teach this book to ninth graders without the proper guardrails. But I do think, as you read from that one school board, like voting to keep it in the libraries, that like this is depicting a lived experience that certainly at its point of publication and I would argue probably likely since it's not as well covered in the textbooks. Right. And it is also. It is just very. It is surprisingly nuanced given some of the kind of the themes that I've. I. That I've articulated. Could feel pretty blunt. And they. They don't feel blunt in. In the book. I think that's what I. What I mean to say there.
- [63:43]
A
Okay.
- [63:45]
B
And there's just. The whole book is just full of writing like that. That is like unbelievable. How did you distill this cutting thing so easily?
- [63:57]
A
Yeah.
- [63:59]
B
That I think I may have underappreciated in some other Morrison. I will say.
- [64:05]
A
Okay.
- [64:06]
B
So that's the bluest eye. So I got.
- [64:11]
A
Sounds like a. Sounds like. Sounds like a doozy.
- [64:14]
B
It's a bit of a doozy. Bit of a doozy. We'll be thinking about it because it is again, for a book that's almost 60 years old, it is doing stuff that we've certainly read books since do that sentence sucked.
- [64:34]
A
You got lost in a mate.
- [64:39]
B
But it feels fresh when you're reading it. And the. It's well sketched out.
- [64:47]
A
Yeah. Great.
- [64:48]
B
That's what I got. Thanks for letting me tell you about this book, Andrew.
- [64:51]
A
Yeah, thanks for telling me.
- [64:52]
B
Sorry I had to remind you that Dick and Jane.
- [64:54]
A
It's okay. No, it's like I can be reminded. I just don't want to go back.
- [64:58]
B
Yeah, that's fair. I won't put you back there, man.
- [65:02]
A
Now I'm just thinking about how ominous father was in that.
- [65:06]
B
It's that it is. You the way Father is deployed in the chapter heads in this book, it is ominous. So like, I don't think we were making something up.
- [65:15]
A
No, there's an, there's an aura of menace to Father that I'm glad that multiple authors are sort of, sort of locking, you know, on now. Yeah.
- [65:24]
B
Yeah. All right. Well, if folks at home have any experience with the bluest eye or want to tell us more about, like, did you teach it or have encountered it in schools, please let us know. Send us an email. Overdue podmail.com hit us up on social media. Verdupod. Our theme song is composed by Nick Laranges. Andrew, if folks want to know more about the show, where do they go?
- [65:47]
A
Overdue Podcast.com is the Internet website. Up there we have the list of books that we have read and the ones that we are going to read. You can follow along with the, the show there. Next week, of course, for July 27th, I will be reading the first book in the on the Calculation of Volume series by Suvay Bala, I believe is the pronunciation. But I will double check that. By the time we, by the time we record the episode. I finished the book already.
- [66:17]
B
Wonderful.
- [66:18]
A
Yeah. There was some discussion in our, in our Discord community about the book. People asking questions like, when is something going to happen?
- [66:31]
B
I have gotten no whiff from you that you didn't have a good read though, so I'm interested.
- [66:35]
A
No, no, I had a, I had a good read. But the way I, the way I approach a book like this, I think is it might be fundamentally different than the way that I would approach a different book.
- [66:48]
B
Oh.
- [66:48]
A
Going in, knowing that it's a time loop thing changes things for me is all I'll say.
- [66:52]
B
I know you love a time loop. I know you do.
- [66:54]
A
I love a time loop. I love a time loop. I love a time loop.
- [66:58]
B
He loves a time loop.
- [66:59]
A
Oh, now I'm stuck in a time loop. Oh, man, sorry. I hate to do that on air. Patreon.com overdue pod to join the Discord conversation that we just talked about, you can kick us a little bit of money, pay for books, pay for hosting, pay for equipment and other things and you get, you get to join that Discord. You get bonus episodes. You get our long read project. We're going to watch the film AKIRA from what, 1988, I think. Yeah, 87, late 80s. We're going to talk about it. We're going to put an episode up about it. We also have other plans to do, to do other things, other movies. Other movies and our newsletter and other stuff. Patreon.com overdue pod that's right.
- [67:47]
B
You said what you're going to read next. I said I don't have anything else to say.
- [67:50]
A
I don't want to get caught in another time loop. So everybody, thank you so much for listening to our podcast, the Bluest Guys. And until we talk to you next week, please try to be happy. That was a Headgum Podcast.
- [68:32]
B
Hi, I am Mandy Moore.
- [68:34]
A
Sterling K. Brown.
- [68:35]
B
And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast that Was Us now on Headgum.
- [68:40]
A
Each episode we're gonna go into a
- [68:41]
B
deep dive from our show. This Is Us.
- [68:44]
A
That's right.
- [68:44]
B
We're gonna go episode by episode. We're also gonna pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers, casting directors. Are we gonna cry? Yes, a little bit. Are we gonna laugh a lot? A whole lot.
- [68:57]
A
That's what I'm hoping, man.
- [68:59]
B
Listen to.
- [68:59]
A
That Was Us on your favorite podcast app. Or watch full video episodes on YouTube
- [69:04]
B
or Spotify new episodes every Tuesday.