For another part, Bloomsday turns Joyce into a national and international hero in a way that risks misinterpreting his literary project. Bloomsday has become a day of haughty panegyrics. Almost a century removed from the heyday of high modernism, it’s easy to render James Joyce a staid and honorable figure of cultural uprightness. But nothing could be less the case. Ulysses bathes in low-culture vulgarity, even if it’s hard for today’s reader to see it clearly. The choice of June 16 as an homage to his future wife’s first date is partly romantic, but partly bawdy, too. As the story goes, the date ended in a handjob, a sex act profane in such a humdrum way that is “not even deserving of its own Latinate nickname,” as the writer James S. Murphy once observed in Vanity Fair. The book itself was long considered profane, too: it was banned for vulgarity in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1920s, although that history is as forgotten today as are Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, which now seem genteel compared to just about any Google Image search.

Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants in faux-humble deference to tradition, as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot had done by incorporating classical references and source material, Joyce devoured and disgorged them again. And it was beautiful and real, like watching a drunk heave outside a pub in the wee hours of the morning. This is life.

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I’ve faced the dispassion of Joyce’s dual legacy head-on. In 2007, the entrepreneur and fellow Joyce aficionado Ian McCarthy and I set out to create a modest disruption of the aspects of the Bloomsday Industrial Complex via contemporary technology: a cast of Twitter accounts for the characters in one of the book’s chapters, programmed to tweet the chapter’s events in real-time.

Joyce’s novel is structured in relation to the Homeric epic The Odyssey (“Ulysses” is the Roman name for Odysseus). Each chapter (or “episode”) of the novel corresponds with, and plays with the themes of, a book of the epic. For example, Odysseus’s outsmarting of the Cyclops in The Odyssey is transformed into an encounter between Leopold Bloom and an abusive character called “The Citizen” in Barney Kiernan’s pub.

Ian and I targeted episode 10 of the novel, “Wandering Rocks,” the only chapter without a direct Homeric parallel (In Greek mythology, these planktai, or “wanderers,” were rocks said to produce particularly violent seas that smash ships to bits; Odysseus braved the route between Scylla and Charybdis rather than risk it with the planktai). The episode presents vignettes of the activities of 19 Dubliners. The result is a lattice of the anonymous bustle of urban modernity, in which some of the novel’s main characters become enmeshed. The struggle and collision between all these possible stories, none fully told, analogize the chaotic planktai. And yet, these wandering rocks, a bulwark of total danger in Homer’s epic, become neither positive or negative in Joyce’s novel. The ragged bodies and places and events of the modern city aren’t dangerous, exactly. They just are.