In case you're still wondering

…Paris Review – Bloomsday Explained, Jonathan Goldman. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The answer lies in the celebrity and cultural capital of the Joyce brand, the result of Joyce’s machinations and the way he’s been taken up in mainstream U.S. culture. When Joyce started work on Ulysses a hundred years ago, he was a rather cultish figure, having recently published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, after many roadblocks for both. This limited but fervid devotion played into Joyce’s career: through the efforts of Ezra Pound, Ulysses and its author became something of a cause célèbre for modernist coteries. Pound secured Joyce patronage (largely from women—Joyce’s career is unthinkable without the interventions of Harriet Shaw Weaver, among others), enabling him to leave off teaching to write (the dream of many). A series of public legal incidents catapulted the novel into wider public consciousness: the seizure of copies ofThe Little Review that contained the “Nausikaaa” chapter, Joyce’s campaign to prevent Samuel Roth from selling a pirated edition, and the 1933 case “The United States of America v. One Book Called ‘Ulysses,’” in which Judge John Woolsey determined thatUlysses was art, not smut. In the 1930s, Joyce appeared on the cover of Time and Stalin’s list of banned authors, and generally became famous as the epitome of literary difficulty and elitism.