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Happy Bloomsday!! If you’re not a James Joyce aficionado (or if you’re not familiar with obscure holidays), June 16 is the day all of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses take place. The name comes from Leopold Bloom, the main character in the novel. To honor Bloomsday and James Joyce, here are a few fun facts about one of Ireland’s (and the world’s) most beloved authors.

1. Why June 16? Of all the days in the year, you have to wonder why Joyce chose that exact date for Ulysses to take place. Well, the answer is actually pretty simple: it’s that day in 1904 when he had his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

2. He and Nora had quite the passionate love affair, as evidenced by the many erotic letters they wrote one another and saved for posterity. One of the letters sold for nearly half a million dollars at Sotheby’s in 2004. Here’s a sample of Joyce’s writing for you – and this is one of the tamer bits: “The two parts of your body which do dirty things are the loveliest to me.”

3. Together, Joyce and Barnacle had two children (and at least one miscarriage). Although we don’t know much about Giorgio Joyce, we know quite a bit about Lucia Joyce, who was a pretty fascinating person. She studied ballet with Isadora Duncan, dated Joyce’s contemporary Samuel Beckett, was declared schizophrenic, and was a patient of Carl Jung’s. Most Joyce scholars believe Lucia was the muse for Finnegans Wake. It was Jung’s belief that both Lucia and James suffered from schizophrenia and said the two of them were both headed to the bottom of a river, but James was diving headlong into it and Lucia was falling against her will.

4. Joyce had a couple of pretty serious phobias. His cynophobia (fear of dogs) stemmed from an attack by a neighborhood dog when he was just five years old. And his keraunophobia, fear of thunder and lightning, formed when his religious aunt told him that thunder was an angry God sounding his wrath at humans.

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