Is ths a dgr i c b4 me? Macbeth, the txt msg way
Photo: Royal Shakespeare Theatre
So … the big - or little - news this morning is that the student-only phone company, dot mobile, has launched a new service for its clients. Dubbed "text books", the idea behind the scheme, which is due to launch in January, is that "classic" texts, from Dickens and the Brontes to Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye will be distilled into three or four line text messages and sent out to students as revision aids.

A scheme of this level of patronising absurdity (Paradise Lost in 180 characters? Why? Seriously - why?) would barely cause a ripple in the media, were it not for the fact that it has received the very public backing of John Sutherland, professor of English literature at University College London, whose profile, as chair of this year's Man Booker prize judging panel, is high. Appearing on the Today programme this morning, Sutherland claimed that text message digests of novels such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice could "serve as an aide memoire" of the genuine text, "enabling [students] to back translate into the golden syllables of the original."

There are so many things wrong - deeply, profoundly, hilariously wrong - with this argument that it's difficult to know where to start. Far easier to let the texts speak for themselves. Here, then, in all its pointlessness, is the text message digest of Wuthering Heights:

LockwoodArives"WuthHites&lernsBowtItsHistry.Cathy&HeathclifGrewUpTherB4CmarydEdgar,movd2 ThrushXGrange& rejectd H,who<3?dHer.Cdies but hr daughtrL8rMarrysH'sSon-Linton.b4 H's deth C's ghost haunts hm.

It's hard - it may in fact be impossible - not to suspect Sutherland of endorsing this fatuousness simply to get people's backs up, and to provoke just such self-righteous, foolishly indignant responses as this, while he sits back and laughs at us all for rising to the bait.

If this is the case, then fair play to him: the literary world is unquestionably too po-faced for its own good. In fact, as soon as you ignore the condescending nonsense Sutherland and the mobile company are spouting about the texts being a "valuable learning tool for students of English literature", the whole thing becomes quite entertaining, along the lines of this snort-worthy retelling of Romeo and Juliet, entirely in emoticons.

So I say let's play the professor at his own game. I have on my desk a crisp, shiny copy of Transgressions, a collection of 10 new novellas from authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, which I'll send out to the vulturite who comes up with the most ludicrously reductive txt msg version of a Shakespeare play, as judged by the GU arts desk. Humour and ridiculousness will be awarded; concise "learning tool" plot summaries will not.

Over to you …