Would Ulysses be as cool if it had never been banned? Probably. Still, there’s no denying the utility of the censorship ban to its legend, whiff of the forbidden and all that. I’m not clear on when we started wanting our artists misunderstood and marginalized, but certainly Ulysses took its lumps at a time when censorship meant real hardship, and not just a publicist’s stunt to keep a musician in the glossies. So its period of infamy cost it readership and recognition at a time when its author needed it most, and left it prey to unscrupulous publishers who distributed it in brown paper wrappers in order to enhance its reputation as a salacious read rather than dispel that notion.