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Get out of your own head and into a soul band

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle

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I don’t know to what extent this is a universal experience, but to me the last hour of a road trip always feels super long. It doesn’t matter if I’ve driven 200 miles or 600 miles, that last hour just draaags. In the US, it feels like we’re in the metaphorical last hour of the COVID shutdowns. More than half of adults have gotten at least one vaccine dose (yay!), including me (YAY!), but it will probably be another couple of months before things really […]

BOOM and BUST in Dublin

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle

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Like many others I was totally taken by the sheer force of a movie that was The Commitments back in 1991. Maybe it was the story about a band – soul music never sounded so good on a silver screen. Or perhaps due to living in Edinburgh at the time: I was practically almost next door to Dublin where The Commitments was happening. At least, it felt like it, coming from the early 1990s Finland, after the Cold War, after the collapse of Soviet Union, Finland […]

Dublin Soul

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle

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Cbr12bingo Music, BINGO ~ 4 corners and center square Also an “adaptation” possibility Irish writer Roddy Doyle’s first novel (published in 1987) is set in 1980’s Dublin and centers on a group of working class teens/20-somethings (and one geezer) who come together to form “the world’s hardest working band,” The Commitments. The Commitments is a short, humorous novel that tracks the group’s rocky development and ambitions. Its lively colloquial dialog makes the characters come alive and keeps the novel moving at a rapid clip. Jimmy […]

–He used up two rolls of toilet paper, Liam told us.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle

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I feel quite similarly to this book that I did to James Kelman’s book How Late it Was How Late, but that this one is significantly better for a few ways. If you haven’t read this one, it’s spiritually connected to Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy — The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van — in that it takes place in Barrytown, but it’s mostly inside the mind/experience of a 12 year old boy in the 1960s/1970s or so. It’s a bit stream of consciousness and […]

A Man, A Van, Japan: Two Reviews

The Van; Some Prefer Nettles by Roddy Doyle; Junichiro Tanizaki

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The Van – Roddy Doyle – 4/5 Stars This is the third book of the Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle. The previous books are The Commitments and The Snapper. All three take place in a lower class neighborhood in Dublin, Ireland in the 1980s and spiral around various members of the Rabbitte family, a family who along with being desperately poor and loving, seem to have an endless number of kids coming and going. And like the difference between The Commitments and The Snapper, it’s […]

One time my friend…

Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle

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One time my friend, who is a musician, wrote this album and I bought it. I listened to it a handful of times and afterward I was like…..oh no, I think he got a divorce. Because the songs were so sad and pleading and heartfelt I was worried. So some internet snooping later, it turns out I was right. I get the same feeling from this collection of stories. It’s not the saddest thing I have ever read, but it has such a motif of […]



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