Digitally Remastered Classics

A new business for an illiterate generation

This short story, part of Litverse’s monthly Short Story Saturday feature, is inspired by Litverse’s “Screen-First Souls” collection. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 for more context. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter.

Digitally Remastered Classics

Like most other English professors at most other universities, Professor Nick Educht spent his spare time hunched over his computer like a caveman trying to start a fire. He would occasionally stroke his graying stubble with the palm of his hand and look distantly out the window into the bright fall morning, then proceed to curse. His novel, The Microcosm of Time, sat on the monitor. It was a half-finished jumble of topographical arithmetic: stunted paragraphs like trees that had never seen sunlight, two-dimensional characters who vomited platitudes, underdeveloped themes like unfurnished buildings. The more he stared at the blinking cursor, the more delirious he felt. The monitor itself seemed to lurch toward him, yawning open like a cave of white light.

Professor Educht shook his head violently, sending his locks of curly brown hair into a frenzy. With some sense of relief, he let his hand land on the mouse. He rested it there passively for a moment, then steered the cursor away from the document and onto the Internet Explorer icon. The internet opened up in front of him, a great flood of words, pictures, and stimulatory relief.

With a sharp sense of satisfaction, he read something about how someone in the government had said something that would irreparably damage his campaign. He skipped the last few paragraphs and checked his email. He lingered on a message from his sister, a doctor in Houston. The sheer immensity of her email, the studs of periods and curvaceous ballerinas of question marks, all served to overwhelm him. He squinted, trying to comprehend a sentence about how his niece had gotten into trouble with her school or sports team, then went onto YouTube to watch videos of his favorite, long-dead jazz musicians. These were artists whose talent and names had more or less turned to dust upon their death, whose mournful tunes Professor Educht jealously clutched to his heart, resentful of anyone else he knew who would even dare suggest that they, too, knew of Ryder Jerry or Barry Sage. Fellow YouTube viewers clearly felt the same vindicated sense of appreciating the unappreciated, blurting uncapitalized, unpunctuated croaks of comments at the modern world's apathy for Real Art.

Professor Educht's wife, Virginia, called out to announce that she had brought home potatoes and needed help peeling them. “Virginia,” he said in a practiced, long-suffering voice. “I'm trying to write!”

*

The summer was supposed to be Professor Educht's time to finish his novel. He had finally won tenure at Benston College for his ground-breaking thesis on why The Brothers Karamazov had to be exactly as long as Fyodor Dostoyevsky had written it. The paper had been called No More, No Less and received the Gold Star of Literary Excellence from The Literarium Review, one of the most highly regarded magazines in the world of English professors.

Benston College finally released him from the limbo of teaching Modern English 101 to football players trying to invite timid girls to parties and math majors whose no-nonsense words fell onto the page like bags of marbles. Professor Educht was given permission to start his very own Specialty Seminar, the kinds of classes frequented by students who had declared their English majors and were now rooting for knowledge not in the wide, open spaces of library shelves and mainstream literature and Wikipedia, but in the crevices and corners of books where one might find literary theory that would give them a lifelong philosophy guaranteed to never allow them to read for reading’s sake ever again.

Naturally, Professor Educht's Specialty Seminar was entitled No More, No Less. The entire curriculum was based on analyzing each page of Brothers Karamazov. Students were told to dissect the book and highlight 10 different themes per chapter. In Professor Educht's mind, the point of this exercise was to teach students how malleable Dostoyevsky's writing was, how it could be bent to form different meanings, but never broken. Students who were under the impression that other books would be read during this semester quickly decided that No More, No Less, would be a “fucking stupid class.”

Professor Educht launched his Specialty with enthusiasm. At forty-two, he felt that he was closer in age to the students than the other English professors, who were in their fifties and sixties and had long ago retreated into the basements of their specialized intelligence to hide from change like people in bomb shelters. Professor Educht tried to endear himself to students by making a Twitter account and following them, occasionally tweeting literary news and short stories at them. Students felt threatened by Educht's adoption of social media and decided he was “creepy,” particularly when he carefully took a picture of himself in the mirror, made it his profile picture on Facebook, and attempted to Friend them. Each class, both the students and Educht knew that his Friend Request loomed, unrequited, on their Facebook Profiles. Neither party broached the silence on the subject.

After two weeks of vigorously trying to engage with his students, Educht sank back into the sullen, mumbling performance of pre-tenure. He went back to impatiently grading papers beside his computer while trying to write The Microcosm of Time. Yet it seemed that every hour, there was another warbling student emailing him about how he or she couldn't get an essay in on time or felt too sick to go to class. This was also when Professor Educht discovered that he could look at old girlfriends on Facebook and prey on famous writers on Twitter, so he naturally had even more trouble concentrating on his novel. Instead, he consumed articles about the death of books and bookstores and publishers and authors with an almost perverse pleasure, submitting to the existential hypothesis that it was now impossible to publish a book if you hadn't published one before and weren't writing something that had a Commercial Plot.

“My friend Barbara just published her book,” Virginia said at dinner one night, talking over the pterodactyl calls of their five-year-old son, Brian, as he proclaimed that he hated peas. Professor Educht pursed his lips, restraining himself from telling Virginia that she was making the mistake of believing that writers enjoyed hearing about the successes of other writers.

“Was it an eBook?” he managed.

“Yeah,” Virginia said. “She says the secret is that you have to market yourself these days. But what's happening to books these days is actually better for writers. She says that the problem is that publishers and agents can't adapt fast enough.”

“Writers don't market themselves,” Professor Educht said, sneering at the wrinkled peas on his plate. “Ebooks are better for writers, because now anyone get something published. But they're not better for literature.”

“Don't be such an elitist,” Virginia sighed. A bony blond who was thirty-eight, Virginia was often thought to be out of Professor Educht's league. Yet the matrimonial variables of early thirties’ panic and having a weakness for shy academics had combined to form a happy marriage. Married to Professor Educht for almost six years, Virginia had grown habituated to his bursts of solipsism, the sentences that swung like battering rams through her carefully constructed castles of etiquette, optimism, and pragmatism. Even when she was dating Professor Educht, back when he was only known as Nick Educht, Virginia foresaw the distinct possibility that he wouldn't publish something and he would take it out on the world. She wondered, sometimes, if she loved him because he was a writer or despite the fact he was a writer.

“Content is becoming diluted, it's a swamp of mediocrity,” Professor Educht wailed, making sure he was louder than their screeching son. “Writers can't stick out anymore, they just have to become factories of words!”

Virginia smoothly plucked his glass of wine from the table and placed it next to her plate.

“Hey,” he said.

“I think you've whined enough tonight.”

Professor Educht chuckled, Virginia giggled. Brian laughed with them.

*

Although Professor Educht had owned a smartphone for several months after a tattooed twentysomething girl with pink hair assured him it was “an upgrade,” he hadn't used it for more than phone calls, photos, and directions. When he realized that he could access Facebook and Twitter from it, he immediately installed the applications and spent hours sitting in the living room, scrolling through pictures of his high school girlfriend or his two college flings, petrified that he would accidentally swipe the “Like” button with his thumb and leave his mark there, like a careless predator breaking a twig and startling a deer.

He also enjoyed using Wikipedia during his weekly meals with the other English professors. They would be debating the finer points of Shakespeare or Foucault and he could immediately summon his smartphone. It made him the arbiter of each argument, an impartial spectator with the sole power to judge. His quick thumbs made him a respected and formidable force at the table in the college cafeteria during his conversations with colleagues.

By mid-October, Professor Educht had 642 followers on Twitter and 145 Friends on Facebook. He was adored for his insightful, literary tweets and lauded for his sarcastic status updates on Facebook. An update such as “Just got out of another 201 class where exactly zero people participated. Dickens had no idea what was ahead when he wrote Hard Times, these are the real hard times!” received an average of two to three Likes.

It was a rainy fall evening, a Saturday, when Professor Educht picked up The Brothers Karamazov and decided that he wanted to read the book for the twenty-second time. He even decided that he could experiment with having his smartphone on the table next to his reading chair, fantasizing that it could serve as a reading companion. He reasoned that, whenever he wanted to look up an analysis or a paper or a key moment in Dostoyevsky’s life, he could immediately tap his way there.

“This,” he mused to himself, “will be unprecedented.”

Professor Educht's reading hours were generally 11pm to 1am, when Virginia and Brian were asleep. He occasionally managed to sneak some reading in during the weekends as well, fumbling with a book like a teenage lover at bra straps as Virginia played a game with Brian in the other room. This was always a pulse-pounding risk for him, because Professor Educht knew that, sooner or later, Virginia would find him and accuse him of being “uninvolved.” As he reflected on Virginia's unreasonable expectations of a father's duties, he realized that this habit had tapered off ever since he had gotten his smartphone and started using social media. In fact, he couldn't remember when he had last read a book at all.

Listening to the soft rain against the windows of his home office, Professor Educht settled into his chair and opened up The Brothers Karamazov, already feeling the heady anticipation of being thoroughly embraced by every word, of feeling the silky-smooth caress of pure literary genius. Not the tripe that Virginia’s friend ‘Barbara’ wrote, he thought viciously. Yet when he opened the book, he found that he could only read the first paragraph before his mind strayed from the pages like a listing boat. Invasive sounds attacked from all angles. The slight swell of the wind against the windowpane, the hush of the rain. A floorboard creaking, a car passing outside with a brief brilliant glare of headlights through the office’s curtains. And, of course, the incessant clucking of the grandfather clock that had been passed down to Virginia as an heirloom by her mother, an artifact she stubbornly kept in rotation that no contractor had been able to cure of a twitching and unpredictable second hand.

“I like when it chimes,” Virgina had told him. “It's like I can feel time passing in my heart.”

He put his book face-down on the armrest and tweeted something clever about “reader's block.” He checked his email on his phone. Several students had said that they would be unable to make it to Monday's Specialty Seminar. Family issues, cross-country race. Like a hesitant traveler staring at a crossroad, Professor Educht tapped his way deeper into the jungle and peeled away the foliage of YouTube and swung from news site to news site like a chimpanzee from vines, even issuing several delighted hoots at particularly nasty comments left by similar hominids who decided to howl at each other. His journey led him to an app store, where he found several free games with colorful shapes.

The grandfather clock groaned to announce the new hour, a primordial voice that boomed throughout the house. Educht put his phone down. It was 1am. The Brothers Karamazov lay untouched on the armrest.

“I never have enough time,” he growled as he got up to brush his teeth.

*

The next morning, a Sunday, Virginia insisted that Professor Educht accompany her to a “coffee date” with Barbara and Barbara's husband, Roy. Virginia secretly hoped that it would awaken her husband to the world outside himself. Often, she felt like she was dragging him from a cave and forcing him into the sunlight of a social world where people smiled and talked and enjoyed each other's company. She wanted Professor Educht to listen to Barbara talk about her self-published novel, hoping he would feel inspired. Virginia wanted to prod her husband into self-publishing his own book, so he could finally feel like he had achieved whatever he was trying to achieve with The Microcosm of Time.

“I don't like them,” Professor Educht reminded her as decided whether to wear his professorial loafers or a pair of unused sneakers that gleamed in the closet.

“Oh, you don't give them a chance. Barbara's a good friend of mine. She loves the artwork I make at the gallery, and Roy's really funny.”

“Roy always asks me about sports, Virginia. It's like a language barrier. I don't even know anything about the Benston Bears, much less some kind of state organization.”

Virginia pretended not to hear him. As she fastened an earring she hoped would impress Barbara's acute eye for expensive jewelry, she shouted instructions down to Christina, the wiry teenager in charge of making sure Brian didn't starve, break anything, or die. Feeling disenfranchised, Professor Educht forced his feet into the stiff sneakers, flushing in embarrassment when he looked down and saw them staring back at him: clear indicators that his life had been spent sitting, contemplating, and not engaging in manly, physical pursuits. Despite his meticulously maintained air of academic aloofness, some prehistoric high school instinct made him want to impress Roy and he was never sure he succeeded.

As he went down the stairs and passed through the living room, Professor Educht passed The Brothers Karamazov, which was still splayed on the armrest, awaiting him like an impatient, unforgiving lover. Begging to be read, reminding him of the failure of the night before. Roy had always liked to hear about his studies about literature, but that was because Roy was the kind of man who always acted impressed with everything. Professor Educht could tell that Roy's actual level of respect for most people was a cool, implacable lake. The only way Educht had managed to cast a stone into that water was by referencing his most recent revelations into The Brothers Karamazov, which Roy liked because he liked “stuff about Russia.” And now, he couldn't even do that. He hadn’t had enough time.

*

Benston was a brick college town with two main streets and a patch of grass called “The Green” where colorful tents and canvases bloomed during the weekend, the goods below them ranging from locally grown fruit and locally murdered meats to rusty antiques offering various levels of probability of being haunted. The Green was used by college kids as something of a highway to different parties, where they congregated on blankets between the leafy oak trees to smoke marijuana or hide behind the mossy boulder by the gas station to drinks vodka from Gatorade bottles.

Professor Educht regarded the downtown area of Benston as an experiment in the biology of business. The main streets burst with an overpopulation of pizza shops, bars, and clever clothing stores. Given there were no industries in Benston beyond farming, service, and retail, these establishments no longer had any natural predators to keep the population in check.

Fortunately, the demand for coffee that didn't taste like it had been brewed from ash was so great that there was still an independent coffee shop in town, The Benston Bean, a slouching place painted the peppermint reds and whites of Benston University. Inside, patrons could find prohibitively priced goods that represented the superiority of the shop (and all the shop’s customers) to Starbucks. Melllow, over-produced R&B played in the morning and whiny folk music played in the evening. Wooden tables and stools that looked freshly hewn stood central among medieval metal chairs that screeched in agony when moved.

Virginia parked their green Subaru outside The Benston Bean. Professor Educht saw Barbara and Roy waiting for them on the wheelchair ramp leading to the doors. Barbara's hair was a brick-and-copper hue. She had chosen to dress in all dark colors for the occasion and augment herself with glittering tokens: two bracelets per wrist, four rings per hand, and emerald earrings. Roy had the dehydrated look of a chronic runner. The bastard could probably still see his ribs, Professor Educht thought.

Barbara and Virginia embraced, trading kisses on their cheeks, a tradition they had maintained since they had first met at The Benston Bean two years ago, when Brian had gone through a biting phase. Like a shark in a feeding frenzy, he had seesawed on his toddler legs through the coffee shop, located Barbara's ten-year-old daughter, and promptly chomped on her hand. Professor Educht hugged Barbara and exchanged handshakes with Roy.

Inside The Benston Bean, skinny college students held stations at laptops, intravenously plugged into their computers via earphones. They think they're all geniuses, Professor Educht decided with contempt. They didn't know the truth of it: that the world didn't appreciate genius anymore, so there was no point in even trying. The foursome located a long table in the back, where three college girls were hovering over a single smartphone, offering rigorous analysis of messages from “the guy from last night.”

Barbara launched into a discussion of how Benston Public High School was “going down the tubes,” and how her children were having a “tough time there.” Professor Educht stirred his iced coffee with a thin straw and nodded. Virginia empathized through statistics she had read in The Benston Bugle. Roy nursed his coffee between his hands and blew a long breath. Professor Educht wondered if Roy dreaded these get-togethers as much as he did, the merciless way that wives ornamented occasions with their accessory husbands to see if they matched when it was any mature male's instinct to retire into their territory and stay there.

“How's the book coming, Nick?” Roy asked.

“It's not, not really,” Professor Educht replied. “Sometimes, I wonder if it's worth it. There just isn't a chance to get a novel published as a first-time author anymore. “

“That's sort of defeatist, don't you think?” Roy sipped at his coffee. “Barbara just self-published.”

Professor Educht cringed. He felt like Roy had just admitted some deep, dark secret about Barbara, some barely legal fetish.

Roy laughed. “Don't be like that. It's the future. In my industry, we're trying to figure out how to help promote self-published authors.”

Professor Educht remembered that Roy worked in “digital marketing,” an arcane combination of words that he couldn’t even visualize beyond flashing pop-up ads and the general destruction of his internet experience.

Look at it this way, Nick: you no longer have to compromise your work to please the editors, publishers, agents. You have the freedom to publish whenever, wherever, however, whatever you want.”

“But so does everyone else.”

“You just have to promote it the right way,” Barbara interjected. “Roy and I worked hard to spread the word about my novel and you know what? I'm selling a few dozen copies a week.”

“But that's women's fiction,” Professor Educht complained. “There's a huge market for it. If you want to publish something truly literary, well, forget it.”

“Nowhere's a good place for literary fiction,” Roy chuckled. “What does that even mean? Like The Great Gatsby?”

“Well-”

“Now, Nick, women's fiction is popular, because people love it. No matter how you publish, you have to write something that people actually want to read,” Virginia said sternly.

Professor Educht glanced at Barbara and realized he had offended her. He tapped the coffee glass, watching his print appear and dissolve before his eyes. “All I mean is that you can't get people to read a work of deeper meaning by self-publishing. They won't find it and the masses won't like it.”

Barbara's face drooped further. Professor Educht knew he had said the wrong thing again. Roy was checking his email on his phone.

“Have you ever read a book of women's fiction?” Virginia challenged. “Have you ever self-published something?”

“Even The Great Gatsby is basically women’s fiction,” Barbara added.

“That’s not-”

“It's not all relationships and flowers,” Barbara said. “You know, Nick, I think you could really benefit from reading something outside your comfort zone. You're sounding like a literary elitist right now.”

“I’m...” He coughed. “I’m literally a literary professor.”

“That doesn’t mean you know it all.”

Roy tapped his phone and looked up from it, thoroughly unfazed by the exchange. He was cool, Educht thought with a mix of admiration and jealously. So cool. What would it be like to be too cool to care?

“Thing is, Professor Nick, you need to go commercial these days,” he said. “The novel has stayed the same for what, centuries? It's the only form of information that hasn't been significantly restructured for the digital age. It's past due.”

“What's the point?” Professor Educht asked. “No one reads the kind of thing I write anymore. No one even really reads anymore.”

“Now, of course, that's not true,” Roy said. “People are reading more than ever. Kids are texting and navigating the internet before they're in school, for God's sake. Everything on the internet is a form of literature.”

“It's not literature!” Professor Educht exclaimed. “Literature has structure, it has characters, it has depth and meaning and symbols. A blog post or internet video or social post or something, that's the compost of some nobody's thoughts that won't matter in a week.”

Barbara sighed. “You haven’t even tried and you decided it’s all hopeless.”

“There's so much more competition, though, that's been one of Nick's problems,” Virginia said. “Anyone can publish, so it's harder to stand out. The traditional filters, like agents and editors have broken down.”

Roy shrugged. “Look at YouTube. The best stuff still rises to the top.”

“More people watch stupid videos online than they read books,” Professor Educht said.

“There’s a reason for that. ‘Stupid videos’ are easily digestible. They accommodate the new way that people consume information. Novels? They drone on and on, taking it for granted someone will pay attention for hours on end.” Roy snapped his fingers. “People want to be entertained now, now, now! Novels don't do it. There's not enough stimulation.”

“Unless you dress them with exciting hooks and turns and characters and things like that,” Barbara added. “That's why my novel is doing pretty well, even if it's trapped in the positively dreadful genre of 'women's fiction.'”

There was a small pause as everyone deflated in their seats, having reached their capacity for exposition. The food arrived and they ate in silence without looking anywhere specifically. Roy finished first and asked what road Professor Educht was taking to get to the college these days. Professor Educht replied that he was taking Route 2. Barbara said that Route 2 was always under construction and she and Roy had found a great back road that gets right to downtown Benston. Virginia explained passionately that they had to do something about all the potholes on the back roads before she would ever use them, then asked if anyone else thought that Benston was getting more congested as the years went by.

“Yeah, you know,” Roy said, flicking a crumb off his mouth, “traffic in general is a nightmare.”

*

Virginia taunted Professor Educht on the way back, first for insulting Barbara's genre, then for daring to think that the coffee date with the Waldens wouldn't be a good time. “Some thought-provoking discussion there, huh? You have to admit that,” she said, waggling her eyebrows at him.

For Professor Educht, the discussion had succeeded in provoking a modest amount of anxiety. Although, he conceded, maybe anxiety was a form of thought. Maybe even inspiration. This specific anxiety trailed him into the house, into his study, and sent thoughts crawling his mind like ants. He wondered if his style of writing was obsolete. If his skill set in simulating something so specific and specialized had been replaced by technology.

Roy was right: the novel, as a form of information, didn't conform to the new era. Writers, publishers, agents, editors were a dwindling tribe of believers praying to the gods of a bygone era. He was reminded of his mother, who had insisted computers were unnecessary. That had been a quirk to be accommodated. After all, really, why would she have had to adapt? She was retired, set in her life and ambitions and dreams like a statue. But Professor Educht was too young to suffer that fate. He had to find a way to adapt.

He grabbed The Brothers Karamazov from his chair's armrest and dropped into the seat. The more he read, the more impatient he became. Dostoyevsky's style seemed meandering, pompous, elaborate. “Obsolete,” Professor Educht dared to mumble. He backpedaled in shame. Dostoyevsky's style was obsolete to the way that most people processed information. In his classes, the disengaged students couldn't seem to grasp even the most basic concepts of older books. Like most of the words they read ran right though their brains like water, the stories streams rather than stones.

Professor Educht placed The Brothers Karamazov back on the armrest, walked to his desk, turned on his laptop, to open up a new document. He wriggled his fingers like he was warming up for a piano recital, then placed them, light as feathers, on the keyboard: The Brothers Karamazov: The Digitally Remastered Classic, he wrote. And he kept writing.

He wrote with more inspiration than he had felt in years. The Microcosm of Time fell behind the days like a waving relative at the train station. Weeks passed as he perfected the project. He worked with as much precision, as much delicacy, as a painter applying the perfect number of brushstrokes. He lassoed Dostoyevsky's wheezing sentences if they galloped too far from the story and unnamed unnecessary characters, shortened the discussions like someone mowing a lawn.

The result was a slender volume that was sixty-two pages in length, a book that emerged in the last week of November when the trees turned to gnarled naked old men. Professor Educht printed fourteen copies of The Brothers Karamazov: The Digitally Remastered Classic at the college library. He distributed it to his Specialty Seminar students the week before the final exam.

“This is a new thing I'm trying,” Professor Educht told his suspicious students. “There's no need to read it, sure, but if you want to do well on the exam, I would advise it.”

Mostly, he said this because he knew his own interpretations of The Brothers Karamazov had leaked like water into his choice edits and curation of the digitally remastered edition. The exam questions were basically based on what he thought were the right things to take away from the entire book and now those answers were easily located in the digitally remastered edition. It was more efficient, more optimized. Better? Better for this generation, Professor Educht concluded, because at least the class would understand the most important parts of The Brothers Karamazov. The destination was the important part, not the scenery, he told himself.

All of his students wrote near-perfect imitations of his own interpretations of the book. Every student passed Professor Educht's Specialty Seminar with As. They informed other students that “the class was fucking stupid and the professor was boring and tries to stalk you on Facebook, but it's awesome for your GPA.” To Professor Educht's delight, thirty-two students chose the Specialty Seminar for winter semester.

*

During Christmas break, Professor Educht wrote with a furor he hadn't known he possessed. He decided that he wanted to digitally remaster other classics, too, from Ulysses to Great Expectations to Moby Dick. Hemingway, Orwell, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Salinger, these were the authors he left alone. “They were far ahead of their time when it came to writing instantly gratifying material,” he told Virginia. “That's why, when you ask an average high schooler what his favorite book is, one of theirs is going to come up.”

When winter semester at Benston College started, Professor Educht handed out copies of The Brothers Karamazov: The Digitally Remastered Classic to his Specialty Seminar students. He also gave other digitally remastered classics to his 200 and 100 level classes. “I want you to buy the original, too, but keep this as a reading companion. I'm conducting an experiment,” he told them.

By February, Professor Educht witnessed the results of his experiment. He administered the same tests and essays to students that he had given the year before, but, thanks to the digitally remastered versions of books, he found that student writing, comprehension, and even participation increased dramatically. The first reading test he gave, something that usually averaged a score of 77, received an average score of 92. Roy was right, Professor Educht decided. Learning had changed, but if you adapted the information to the changing habits in consumption, you could keep younger generations interested in the classics and still give them stepping stones to the literary world.

The Dean of Students disagreed. Lizzie Nelson arranged a meeting with Professor Educht in her office and greeted him with a curt handshake and informed him that two parents had complained about Professor Educht's teaching materials. To his horror, Lizzie had even acquired one of the digitally remastered versions of Infinite Jest, which was the centerpiece of his 201 Postmodern Literature class.

Lizzie flapped the stack of stapled paper in his face. “Professor, can you explain what this is?”

“Um...”

“Parents don't pay tuition for their kids to read some professor's editorialized version of books, they pay for their kids to get exposed to real literature by professors who know what they're talking about. Do you think a professor who hands students a 'digitally remastered' version of a book inspires a lot of faith in that professor? In Benston College as a whole?” Lizzie was more flustered than angry. She was used to dealing with students who vomited on The Green or thought their dorm rooms were ideal storage places for six bottles of whiskey. “And let's not even get into the legal ramifications. What on earth inspired you to do something like this?”

Professor Educht grew indignant. “Well, see here, Lizzie. Kids are learning differently these days. I'm trying to accommodate that. I don't just give them my version, I tell them to get the original, too. That's more of a reading companion.”

“The problem is that most students are just going to read this. It's shorter, it's easier to understand.”

“That's the point!” Professor Educht declared. “I've seen absolutely phenomenal results from my digitally remastered books. Students are participating like never before, because they actually know what's going on. They're not bored in class, and they show a much better grasp of the material than the students who haven't gotten these editions.”

“The material is supposed to be difficult,” Lizzie shot back. “This is college, not kindergarten. And, if I may rather caustically add, you're the one who's in charge of helping them grasp the material in the first place. If they're having trouble, then maybe that reflects on your teaching style, Nick.”

“No, no, no,” Professor Educht said. “Like I said, these kids are just learning differently. They love the digitally remastered versions. My job is to teach them the importance of these books.” He tapped on the stack of ninety-eight pages that was Infinite Jest. “And having these things around has been a huge help.”

“This isn't a negotiation, this is a warning. You have to stop this.”

“So you're saying that it's better to present material that just... that's just obsolete for kids?”

“It's not obsolete, it's just hard to understand for some students. That's why we have people declare majors, Nick. If someone can't read Infinite Jest, then they probably shouldn't be an English major.”

“That,” Professor Educht said, standing, “is elitist.”

*

Unlike Dean Nelson, Roy Walden thought that the idea was ingenious. Professor Educht saw him again for another double date at a flat bread pizza restaurant in Benston where a brick oven radiated heat and magically transformed dough into pizza that cost up to thirty dollars a pie.

“We can really make this thing sing,” Roy said in a passionate voice that Professor Educht had never heard before. “This is the kind of innovation that investors will be all over. You said that your students learned better with your versions?”

Professor Educht nodded.

“That's awesome.” Roy nudged Barbara as she tried to sip her wine. A crimson splash jumped from the glass onto her hot honey sausage pizza.

“Roy!”

“Sorry, but are you listening to this? This is such an innovative idea.”

“Virginia has been telling me about it,” Barbara said uneasily. “To me, it sounds a little... a little out there.”

“What's out there about it?” Roy demanded. “It's just, what, you rewrite classics to make them more digestible. What'd you call them, Nick?”

“Digitally remastered.”

Roy slapped the table. “Investors are going to just... oh, you don't even know. They've been looking for an answer to this whole digital reading thing. Phones, iPads, whatever. This is it.”

“These digitally remastered... whatevers sound like reading companions, or SparkNotes, to me,” Barbara said. “Novels give you the time and space to emotionally and intellectually breathe. These don't seem like novels to me.”

“That's what I said,” Virginia said, despite the fact she had never said something with remotely similar sentiments. She had been relieved Professor Educht had found a hobby to finally occupy that always-empty space inside himself that he had always tried to fill by writing novels. He had been more present ever since he started the project: playing more with Brian, spending more time with her, and, most importantly, he no longer seemed to be wallowing in deeply unattractive self-pity.

“These aren't reading companions and they're not, what, traditional novels,” Roy proclaimed. “Right now, the idea of what a novel is... that's up for grabs. Nick's grabbed it.”

Professor Educht blushed and blushed harder in his embarrassment that the compliment from Roy had made him blush.

“What about the legal issues?” Barbara asked. “You can't rewrite every book under the sun.” She tried to repress the depth of her disgust at the concept. For her, self-publishing a novel had been the absolute fringes of the revolution. She didn't want to believe that there was more frontier to be explored. Literature had journeyed to a dangerous place already and now it seemed like Professor Educht had an idea that was nuclear in proportion.

Roy beamed. “That's the best part. Publishers are scrambling to keep their numbers up. The solution? They sell us exclusive rights to repurpose– sorry, digitally remaster- the material. We share the revenue. Hell, I bet some classics aren't copyrighted, anyhow.”

“What about current authors, honey? What about me?” Barbara asked.

Roy rubbed her arm. “Authors can have a built-in subscription system that goes right to Kindles and iPads and smartphones every week or month or whatever. We'll go back to the days of serializing novels. This is the answer to the content saturation dilemma we talked about before. More books are coming out than ever before. All we have to do is shorten them. That way, readers consume more books and things balance out.”

“But-”

“And we'll hire all the struggling college grads who made the mistake of trying to become agents and editors in the new millennium. They'll be able to work on all these new novella things. God, this is going to be good,. Don't you think? We can call the company Digitally Remastered Classics, that has a nice ring to it.”

Professor Educht wasn't sure when he had proposed a business plan, much less asked for a business partner, but Roy's hand was waiting for his, so he shook it. Their pizzas arrived, steaming masses of cheese and toppings. Conversation stopped, replaced by all four of them hissing through their teeth, tearing at the transformed dough: once supple, malleable, before being cast into the inferno and withdrawn and packaged for taste and taste alone. The ultimate value.