Not quite a Luddite (what freelancer could survive without a PC and modem?), I'm still an unreconstructed believer in the written word as found in newspapers, magazines and between hard covers. Yes, of course the Internet can be a wonderful research tool, but some of us still prefer to get the information we need from the books we've amassed down through the years. Apart from anything else - indeed, above anything else - the shape, feel, portability and sheer physicality of books are what many of us still love. And we can take them on the DART.
So I feel slightly uneasy when Nessa O'Mahony tells me about Electric Acorn, which she describes as "Ireland's first online literary magazine" and whose initial issue (if that's the word for it) includes not just emerging Irish poets and short-story writers but also "various writers from all over the world who have visited the website, liked what they saw and submitted work to the new publication".
Nessa, who is a fine poet herself and a member of Dublin Writer's Workshop, from which this initiative springs, feels that "one of the best aspects of having an Internet website is that it exposes the writer to a much wider audience and provides plenty of potential for exchanges of ideas and views between writers all over the world".
Indeed, Kenyan novelist David Karanja contacted her through the website and, as a consequence, will be reading in the Irish Writers Centre in September, while she has also got responses from Robert Drake, an American who is compiling an anthology of gay writing for Faber, and from New-York-based William Grogan, who has offered to arrange readings for any Dublin Writer's Workshop members visiting the Big Apple.
Nessa's also offering website space to any Irish publications "who could benefit from an on-line presence" and is busily preparing the next issue of Electric Acorn. If you're interested, you can email up to five poems or one 3,000-word short story at: infodublinwriter's.org or send a floppy disc (using an MS Word programme) to Electric Acorn, c/o Nessa O'Mahony, 5 Walnut View, Brookwood, Scholarstown Road, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16. Oh, and the Workshop's website address is: http:/www.dublinwriters.org
Meanwhile, any correspondence to Bookworm will find its way to me at The Irish Times, 11-15 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2. A boringly old-fashioned address, I know, but what can you do.
Here comes Bloomsday and with it the celebration of Bloom's creator, who has just been named by Time magazine as the most influential writer of the century.
In an issue chronicling the Artists and Entertainers of the Century, Time also lists the following:
Most influential artist: Picasso; poet: T.S. Eliot; classical musician: Stravinsky; rock musicians: The Beatles; folk musician: Bob Dylan; jazz musician: Louis Armstrong; soul musician: Aretha Franklin; singer: Frank Sinatra; showmen: Rodgers & Hammerstein; architect: Le Corbusier; designer: Coco Chanel; moviemaker: Spielberg; actor: Brando; comedian: Charlie Chaplin; dancer: Martha Graham; TV star: Lucille Ball; TV creator: Jim Henson; TV host: Oprah Winfrey; cartoon character: Bart Simpson.
One notes that thirteen of these twenty eminences are American and that some of the choices are either perverse (Spielberg, for goodness sake, rather than Griffith, Renoir, Welles, Fellini, Hawks or Hitchcock) or simply daft (Lucille Ball, Jim Henson).
In fact, only three - Joyce, Picasso and Sinatra - seem to this columnist to meet Time's "most influential" requirement, and Joyce is the most obvious. Indeed, Time senior writer Paul Gray argues that the influence of Ulysses can be seen in the works of William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison - "all of whom, unlike Joyce, won the Nobel Prize for Literature".
Actually, this isn't the first time that Joyce has been singled out for celebration by Time. In March 1939, with the publication of Finnegans Wake imminent, he featured on the front cover in a photograph taken by Gisele Freund, of whom Richard Ellmann said: "Gisele Freund found a great subject and James Joyce a great photographer."
Incidentally - or not so incidentally - if you haven't seen Sean O Mordha's Emmy-winning 1982 film, James Joyce: Is There One Who Understands Me, RTE1 are screening it tomorrow night at 11.10pm.
BOOKS UPSTAIRS on College Green are having a terrific sale at the moment, and among the handsome American imports I came across were hardbacks of Larkin's Collected Poems and Heaney's The Spirit Level at £9.99 each and, in paperback at £6.99, the Selected Poems of that underrated - indeed, almost forgotten - American confessional poet, W.D. Snodgrass, whose first collection, Heart's Needle, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959.
But there are scores of other fascinating books on offer at remarkable prices, and I'd advise you to check them out.
I'M told that a phenomenal 30,000 copies of Niall Williams's novel, Four Letters of Love, which was published in hardback last year, have already been sold in paperback, even though it was only released in that format in the last couple of weeks.
If you want to hear the author read from this notable Irish novel, he'll be in Waterstone's of Royal Avenue, Belfast, next Tuesday at 7pm.