I once spent a year wandering the streets of Dublin, thinking I would eventually bump into James Joyce, ineluctably, if only I spent enough time in the right place. Of course I knew he was an expatriate, and of course I knew he had been dead for more than a halfcentury, but neither of these two facts swayed me. In evertightening spirals, I started in the poor North Dublin suburbs, made my way barefoot down the strand, and even caught a bus for Cork, just in case it snowed in Western Ireland and Joyce wanted to reminisce. But, all for nought.

I walked around for half that time with an old camera, a Holga, and a batch of expired film. It was never my intention to document my meeting with Joyce, only to record it for personal use, and it seemed that carrying a bright shiny new multimegapixel digital camera would laugh in the face of my stated unintentionality. Instead, I felt at the time, carrying a lowtech camera with expired film would free me from any cosmic constraints, much as a paparazzi is saddled with as much bad karma as his telephoto lens is long.

I spent a lot of time standing in the middle of the James Joyce Bridge over the exact center of the Liffey. I watched upstream, to the west, ninety percent of the time and downstream, toward the coast, only ten. If one is to stalk modernism’s greatest gift, one must create rules, no matter how arbitrary to outsiders they may seem. The ninety-ten ratio seemed to favor the dead as much as possible, like covering half the black spaces on a roulette table, while allowing me to still watch the sunrise over the Irish Sea without guilt.

At the end of my allotted year, I returned to New York with almost no writing done, just some hastily scrawled notes in the new Moleskine journal I had purchased to hold my Irish writings. One note in particular seemed to sum up my year “Dark rain falling, again, and the brooding day stares down on the sea.” Uncoincidentally, that was my longest note of the year.

Six months after my arrival, I stumbled upon that line, actually two lines, in a first edition copy of Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach I had purchased on ebay for a week’s salary. Standing there, on that bridge, over the Liffey, facing west in the rain, I had momentarily channeled Joyce’s soul.