In a stunning development, someone read Shades.
The U’s undergraduate literary magazine, Shades has transformed itself from a couple of stapled-together pieces of paper into a nicely bound, soft-cover text over the past few years, but has failed to establish a U readership.
Except for Mike Freenom.
A senior studying English, Freenom completed the entire Spring Semester 2001 volume of Shades last week. He is the first non-Shades-affiliated student to read the collection of poetry, short stories and one-act plays from cover to cover.
“And, yeah, it was pretty good,” Freenom said with a shrug.
Freenom credits the Olympics and poor parking planning with his literary-text reading accomplishment.
“I take the bus now, and I’ve got plenty more time to read, waiting at the stop, waiting for the bus to loop through Research Park, and one day I found this little blue book,” he said, holding Shades. “At first, I thought it was one of those books that tells you all the cheats for ‘Final Fantasy CXVII.’ But nope, it was a bunch of poetry.”
Freenom asked his English instructors if they would give him extra credit for reading Shades. Some stroking their beards and others cackling like witches, they denied his request.
“Extra credit is for those proles down in communication,” said an English professor on condition of anonymity. Freenom thinks more kids would read Shades if they got credit for it.
“I think most students don’t find time for Shades, because there’s only so much time a student can devote to U publications,” said Chrisy Tolley, a member of Publication Council.
“Recent studies show students read Continuum for three to four hours a week. Among Continuum, the Century and Page 2 of The Chronicle, there’s just not much time left for poetry written by a bunch of hard-up English majors,” she said.
Tolley quickly added, however, that she fully supports the 0.08 cents from each student’s fees that are diverted to fund Shades as a “critical support for the humanities on-campus” and “wise investment of Pub Council dollars, er, cents.”
Freenom worked through the text over the course of several weeks and is planning on submitting something for next semester’s Shades?an essay on Final Fantasy. But he doubts he’ll have time for it.
“The new Continuum comes out next week,” he said.
Shades has received considerably more attention in recent weeks than it is used to since the inception of a Shades/K-UTE venture, where students read their own poetry on a two-hour-long program Saturday nights on the U’s radio station.
When asked if the K-UTE program turned Freenom on to Shades, he replied, “The U has a radio station?”