Joyce's characters read pulp fiction (the cowboys-and-Indians stories of "An Encounter") and true-crime books (The Memoirs of Vidocq, mentioned in "Araby"). They participate in auto racing and card playing ("After the Race"). They go shopping ("Araby"), dance ("A Little Cloud" and "The Dead"), and celebrate Halloween ("Clay"). Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, is famously obsessed by a newspaper advertisement (for Plumtree's Potted Meat), while his wife Molly (a professional singer) enjoys reading risque novels with titles like Sweets of Sin. In short, these folks do most of the things done by ordinary people of Joyce's day — and today. If he were writing during the twenty-first century, James Joyce's characters would undoubtedly be surfing the Net when not busy wandering the local mall.
Significantly, the inhabitants of Dubliners visit real pubs (Davey Byrne's, for instance) and stores (Fogarty's). They sing real songs ("I Dreamt That I Dwelt"), the music and lyrics to many of which can be located to this day. This melding of the imaginative and the actual was so unusual — so radical — that it resulted in the delay of Dubliners' publication for years, as publishers and printers worried about lawsuits by the owners of the establishments mentioned. In the meantime, Joyce had opened a movie theater during one of his rare return visits to Dublin; later, he would collaborate with the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein in an attempt to bring Ulysses to the screen.
