displays much practical sense based on an appreciation 
     of the hard realities of life. . . .

What Montagu opens up here concerning the intense 
practicality of the nonliterate applies perfectly as gloss to 
Joyce’s Bloom or Odysseus, the resourceful man. What could be 
more practical for a man caught between the Scylla of a literary 
culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to make 
himself a raft of ad copy? He is behaving like Poe’s sailor in the 
Maelstrom  who studied the action of the whirlpool and survives. 
May not it be our job in the new electronic age to study the 
action of the new vortex on the body of the older cultures?