Around the world in 18 chapters sounds like a surreal method of global travel, but this year's Bloomsday celebrations plan boldly to bring James Joyce's classic Ulysses where it has never gone before.
The great Irish writer's words will travel in front of the sun around the time zones, visiting as many cities as there are chapters in the book. Each chapter will be read by a celebrity and "broadcast" in RealAudio over the Internet.
The journey will take listeners from Melbourne to Los Angeles, through cities including London, Mexico City and Buenos Aires.
This novel idea comes to you in the guise of the Global Jameson Bloomsday, presented by Irish Distillers in association with the James Joyce Centre and The Irish Times on the Web (www.irish-times.com/)
Bloomsday celebrates June 16th, 1904, when the hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, walked the streets of Dublin and in one day fulfilled the experiences of a lifetime. The celebration focuses on the theme of this odyssey and on Joyce's idea to "travel around in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep it up for ever - never grow a day older technically."
Frank McCourt and his brother Malachy will read Chapter 12 from Ireland House in New York. Senator David Norris and Ken Monaghan, nephew of James Joyce, will read Chapter 9 from the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. Chapters from Paris and Prague will be read from James Joyce pubs, while in Tokyo, The Hague and Rio de Janeiro, the Irish Embassy will be the venue.
The pubs, cultural centres and other venues worldwide will use no state-of-the art computer technology to organise the event live and will need no software experts standing by. A telephone call to the offices of The Irish Times on the Web in Dublin is all it will take.
There, a RealAudio server will compress the voice into RealAudio format and "stream" it across the Internet on to the visitor's PC, where it will return to the original voice format. The difference between the time at which Joyce's words leave the lips of the reader and the time they reach the ears of the Joyce enthusiast is likely to be only a few seconds. The global reading will be at: www.irish- times.com/globalreading