ulysses in RL

Super cool Bloomsday article at the Irish Times, thanks to Crooked Timber. Here's a particularly hilarious excerpt (actually I'm not sure why I found this so funny):

I became aware of the range of historical characters in Ulysses when working on the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), recently published by Cambridge University Press. Like most staff contributors, I started coming across people who featured in Ulysses , either as themselves or as models for fictional characters. For instance Con Curran, lawyer and writer, appears as himself when Stephen Dedalus remembers that he owes him 10 guineas. Curran was a college friend of Joyce’s, who took the well-known photograph of the becapped Joyce with his hands in his pockets; asked what he was thinking at that moment, Joyce said he was wondering if Con would lend him five shillings.