What ish my nation?

A friend, a Clareman and a New York-based professor, tells the following story: just two weeks ago he arrived in Florence in charge of a number of American college students on an extended academic lark. The professor is in his mid-30s, tall, shy, smart, charming, the sort of man who has his finger on the pulse of what's going on around him. But he also happens to be a tad absent-minded, not the sort who has yet bowed down to the intricacies of bureaucracy. Scattered, or jetlagged, or both, he had to visit the local Italian labour authorities in order to register.

"The building," he says, "was a bit like Kafka goes to San Francisco. I was ushered into a small room, three desks, scraps of paper, a grimacing bookshelf. No computers. It didn't seem terribly official. A nervous middle-aged woman came out, my records in her hand. She was flanked by two young girls who were there to observe. One of the girls was wearing lowrider jeans, the other a t-shirt that said 'City' scripted in diamonds. The middle-aged woman looked at me and asked for my passport. I looked at her blankly and tried to explain that I didn't have my passport with me."

The professor, it must be said, also happens to be quite a handsome man, so the three Italian ladies were probably not adverse to detaining him. The lack of passport might mean that the local carabinieri might have to be called. Maybe the professor could not work in Italy, they suggested. Maybe there was serious bureaucratic trouble on the horizon – the vice-president of the local labour organisation might even have to be called.

"Where're you from?" asked the middle-aged lady.

"Ireland," says the professor.

"Irlanda!" said the lady. "Il professore viene d'Irlanda!"

Before the professor could say another word the middle-aged lady had run to the bookshelves and taken down an Oxford anthology of literature. She thumbed through it and pointed to a page. "Read this," she said.

And so the professor began, in his soft sonorous way, to read the pages. Or perhaps the pages began to read him. Either way, the oxygen was taken from the air. When he looked up, after four pages, the middle-aged woman was teary-eyed and holding her hands to her breast, while the two teenage girls were speechless beside her, and clueless.

"Bravo, Il professore," said the middle-aged woman, who promptly signed the professor's papers with a great flourish.

"Bravo Mister Joyce," said the professor, who scooped up his new identity card, bowed, thanked the officials, and walked out, blessed with another story, into the crisp Italian sunshine.

~

How wonderful that James Joyce can still be our passport. Though the professor read from "The Dead" it is of course Ulysses that comes to mind this week, the extraordinary tale of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904, when Stephen Daedalus descends a stairhead and thereby kicks off a new era in modernism. Some stories are so good they're worth repeating. Leopold Bloom wakes up and brings his wife breakfast in bed, then wanders across Dublin to attend a funeral, tries to flog a few newspaper ads, has an argument in a bar, follows the son of a friend into the red-light district, goes home to sleep beside his wife who, in a stunning stream of consciousness, manages to wake all language out of desire.

Ulysses also happens to be a brilliant compendium of every almost possible literary technique, expanding the range of the word to the infinitely possible. It's a funny book, a portrait of a wanderer, a sad book, a painting of a city, an honest book, a successful attempt at anti-heroic myth-making.

The secret of Ulysses is that – in its mystery – it joins things together. In New York this Friday over 100 readers will gather together to read at Symphony Space, a theatre on the Upper West Side, for 12 hours straight, capped off by the magnificent Finnoula Flanagan in the verbal bodicework of Molly Bloom.

Further downtown, in the financial district, the cobblestones of Stone Street will be the scene of another reading outside Ulysses's bar, where various New Yorkers, in states of dress, undress and redress, will also read the book aloud, drink Guinness, eat grilled mutton kidneys, and spend their own four shillings ninepence on a celebration that goes across time and continents.

Part of the beauty of Ulysses these days is that it has become a celebration of globalism. Not only might this have been the original intention of the book, but it also manages to cement the fact that literature matters in this, the least literary of times.

Some people may feel that the words are now in hock to commercialism, or they may find it corny that by the late afternoon in New York's Stone Street, a couple of hundred slightly over-served people will be singing "Molly Malone" together. But that hardly matters, who cares? – to hell or Dan Brown with the begrudgers.

It may have been Captain MacMorris in Henry V who asked, "What ish my nation?" but it is Bloom who answers it with the idea a nation "is the same people living in the same place".

When further questioned he refines his answer to those "also living in different places", which is what Ulysses so spectacularly achieves, helping us to live here, there and everywhere, and to continue going home to where we come from.