Tag: SINDUS kim

Project Bookshelf: SINDUS Kim

AKA: I Have No Bookshelf And I Must Post

My bookshelf back at the University of North Texas was an IKEA Baggebo held together by duct tape and pure determination. My childhood bookshelf, way back in one of my three hometowns, was made out of polished oak & covered an entire wall from floor to ceiling. Now, in the heart of my motherland, I lack a consistent bookshelf to call home for the first time in my life.

I know. It’s just as devastating as it sounds. I’m really not sure how I’ll recover from this either. In the meantime, though, here are the ten books I’ve hauled to every corner of South Korea during my trip this summer. 

1) Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre — TO READ

I haven’t started properly, but here’s a beautiful quote summarizing the difference between Sartre & Camus. From the introduction by Dr. James Wood: “Camus asked us to fight that imprisonment, if necessary wearily and repetitively; Sartre hoped that we could simply explode the prison.”

2) Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri — TO READ

I haven’t started this one either, but I did buy myself the Korean translation of the text, just to see how a book about translation can be translated. Meta-translation, if you will. Isn’t it lovely?

3) The Stranger by Albert Camus — FINISHED

“For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.” 10/10 — enough said.

4) Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre — TO READ

To be paired with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity & a loving acknowledgment to Sartre’s strange view on women.

(BTW: their story is fascinating. A whirling, open love life between the feminist & existentialist of a century. Beauvoir signing her letters off with Your charming Beaver to a guy who once said he finds ugly women offensive. Sartre’s other love triangle with Albert Camus & Wonda Kosakiewicz. Look it up!)

5) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Korean translation — FINISHED

“잘 쓴 과학소설이란 제일 변화무쌍하고 제일 정신 나간 상상을 뉴스 보도처럼 진실하게 쓴 것이라고 나는 늘 생각했다. 과거의 기억은 언제나 진실하다. 나는 역사학자가 과거를 진실하게 기록하는 것처럼 소설을 쓰고 싶다. 할 수 있을지는 별개의 문제지만. / I’ve always believed a well-written Sci-Fi novel should depict a most creative and insane imagination with the honesty of a news report. Memories of the past are always truthful. I want to write novels the way a historian truthfully records the past. Whether I can, however, is another question.” 

6) Hi, Queer! Issue 6, 중꺽맘 — TO READ

A literary magazine by HYQE – 하이퀴어, the queer club of Hanyang University. The title is an abbreviation of “중요한것은 꺾이지않는 ( )한마음,” which roughly translates to “What Matters Is Your Never-Changing Conviction To ( )”. 

Obtained at the 2024 Seoul Queer Culture Festival.

7) QUEER, FLY Issue 35, 사이 — TO READ

A literary magazine by QIS, Queer In Seoul National University. The title can be translated to distance, relationship, or between.I got this because they told me it contained the Judah/Jesus fanfic, and I was not disappointed. 

Obtained at the 2024 Seoul Queer Culture Festival.

8) Personal Writings by Albert Camus — FINISHED

I despise this book for being the single greatest collection of essays I have ever read. Camus clearly wasn’t trying to pioneer my CNF writing style forever, but he did anyway.

9) 여자들의 섹스북 by 한채윤 — FINISHED

Translation: Women’s Sex-Book by Han Chae-Yun. A book about queer sex for women written by queer, sexual women. I purchased this because I am, frankly, fascinated by the language of sex. What better way to study the topic than to read for myself?

Obtained at the 2024 Seoul Queer Culture Festival.

10) On Freedom by Maggie Nelson — READING

One of two essay collections that brilliantly weaves together the critical, personal, and academic. Beautiful ideas expressed in gorgeous prose, and undeniably within my top five recommendations of all time.

“Nothing stays avant-garde forever; you have to keep moving.” 

& two more that I literally bring around everywhere I go, AKA my current reads…  

11) Bluets by Maggie Nelson — READING

The following quotes are indeed from the same book.

“What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know: I no longer hold you responsible.”

“For my part I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or an airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses and light.”

12) Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde — READING

If On Freedom demonstrates that the critical, personal, and academic can be intertwined, Sister Outsider speaks to why they must be.

“And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into the sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”

Last but not least, my CD collection. At the beginning of this trip, my dad gave me his old Sony Walkman from the 90s—as soon as I got it operational, I went to an indie record shop and blew a century on these beau’s. My recent additions to all my future bookshelves include: 

  1. The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski
  2. THIRSTY by The Black Skirts
  3. Melodrama by Lorde
  4. Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers
  5. Evangelion, Finally 
  6. Cherry Bomb by Tyler, The Creator
  7. TEAM BABY by The Black Skirts
  8. 201: special edition by The Black Skirts

I post stories about my current readings & more over on Instagram under @sinducated. Feel free to ask me any questions!

SINDUS Kim (any/all) is a writer & fan of the odd, off-putting, and preternatural. Though they have a penchant for fiction and CNF/essays, their Word document dedicated to bad poems about their ex-girlfriend well-exceeds fifty pages. You can find him at his completely empty Instagram and Twitter @sinducated, or her website, where she’s open to all kinds of small talk and inquiries.

Meet Our New Intern: SINDUS Kim

A Korean person stands, head turned to the right, so that their face is mostly covered by shoulder-length black hair. They wear a shoulder bag, white pants, and a black shirt that reads MARRIAGE FOR ALL in red punk font. There are trees, grass, and other greenery in the background.

My first work of presentable quality was written in 10th grade, fresh after a devastating breakup with my Discord girlfriend of six months, and published on a well-known fanfiction website in a fever dream of heartache. 

I had explicitly tagged my piece as “Breakup Self-Insert,” because I recognized halfway through the draft that this was a thinly veiled projection of my own angst. A personalized hell of Hurt/No Comfort. Pieces taken from the still-burning house fire that was our mutually blocked DMs, then slapped onto an innocent Google Doc—fourteen thousand words written & proofread in the span of three days. This piece was the final nail in the coffin, my own special closure, and writing it was perhaps the most painful experience in my life: second-place only to admitting on my “Meet Our New Intern” post that I actively wrote fanfiction. 

Be it dissociation or healing, soon after I published the fic, I got over the girl. But I’ll never forget: I woke up the morning after that first chapter and saw that my notifications had exploded overnight. Comments sung praise after praise about a “fresh take on the character” and “a beautiful interpretation.” Every few hours, I’d receive some variation of “I don’t know how you wrote him so correctly!,” and think to myself: thanks, I just pretended he was my ex-girlfriend. I remember being confused, that nobody recognized the deception. Then, one day, the obvious hit me. 

If you squint hard enough, real characters look just like real people. 

Like characters, a real person exists within an ambiguous mishmash of ideals, morality, and history, to fluctuating yet paradoxically static degrees of importance, that influence their decision in any number of ways. These facets layer and collide to form the loose concept we call “self,” whether anthropocentric or otherwise. Similarly, like people, a real character is malleable—so we like to observe this self as it experiences a “thing.” Authors put an extraordinary amount of care into ensuring this happens. Consider everything the self is at this present moment, and why it is that way. Now, here’s a thing. Will the self change? Will it stay the same? Should it? Why, or why not? Or, my favorite—doggone with the character. Will you, the self reading this thing, change as a result of having read it? At the center of literature, there is a push-pull of human reaction; the process of evoking these reactions is what I call art. 

Between real things, the line dividing them is only a matter of semantics. The pravus opus of my career blended a teen lesbian situationship, an adult gay situationship, & every real thing’s real history together until I had something fresh. In the wake of a four-way projection, all of us imposed onto each other, I was left with a sadomasochistic mess of a story—in which every breathtaking reaction was brand spankin’ new. My readers were so compelled by my characters working out their abandonment issues over Spotify playlist descriptions that they could, graciously, overlook the fact that I clearly didn’t know what a semicolon was. 

All this to say: since then, I’ve loved real characters & people everywhere, and I’m elated to continue doing so as an editorial intern for Sundress Publications. I hope this was obvious from the piece, but I got back together with the girl. Please don’t go looking for my fic—I might have to quit my internship if you find it.

SINDUS Kim (any/all) is a writer & fan of the odd, off-putting, and preternatural. Though they have a penchant for fiction and CNF/essays, their Word document dedicated to bad poems about their ex-girlfriend well-exceeds fifty pages. You can find him at his completely empty Instagram and Twitter @sinducated, or her website, where she’s open to all kinds of small talk and inquiries.

Sundress Reads: Review of Meta Work

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
This is a collage of abstract objects such as a grid, stars, and paint throughout the image. There is also half of a face at the bottom right corner. "Meta Work" is in the middle of the image and "Autofiction by Anastasia Wasko" is at the bottom in smaller font.

Anastasia Wasko’s Meta Work (Planet Dust Enterprises, 2021) is a dissociative fever dream wearing the skin of creative nonfiction. The only question is: what type of creative nonfiction? 

A memoir, fittingly, places emphasis on memory. A personal essay explores a life lesson. More often than not, these lines become increasingly blurry as a writer searches for truth within the chaos of memory. Such was Wasko’s challenge writing Meta Work as a memoir, which couldn’t “hold [her] vision of [her] world” (5); wanting to preserve the fantastical, irrational elements of her life, Wasko turned to the genre of autofiction, in which the only promise is an authentic portrayal of herself. 

Through a blur of events and imagery, we readers are only offered one tangible detail: the chapter titles, denoting the location from which Wasko writes. The rest is up to her world of chaos, containing a mannequin with fiery, burning eyes; a river pooling at her ankles in the middle of Eighth Street; a depressed mother whose emotions swing like swords; a repressive father who refuses to consider writing as work; and, most importantly, unreliable time. Despite Meta Work being in chronological order, hours are missing from the story. Wasko’s time skips from 9AM to 5:45 (AM? PM?) to 9PM with no preamble, unobserved. She often breaks from her dazes to ask, “Where am I?” (Wasko 44). The gaping holes in her life are jarring to read, but these absences are intentional—we don’t know what happened, and neither does Wasko. This is, exactly, how she experiences day-to-day life. 

In fiction, as in trauma, there is truth in suffering. In order to simply live, Wasko must navigate an unyielding series of challenges. Existential dread and past trauma is compounded by the divorce of her parents, bipolar disorder, and a sense of insignificance—one she attempts to fight by working as a freelance marketing writer going in and out of the City. 

The City operates as a “mirror” (47) to portray Wasko’s internal chaos, but more specifically, a hatred; she despises her inability to reconcile her trauma and disorder with the rest of herself, and represses as a result. Primarily, this applies to her everyday emotions. After suffering a panic attack inside her office cubicle and being fired (banished) from the concrete jungle, Wasko finds dissociative comfort on the steps of Madison Square Garden. Later, though she swore she “would never come back to” Greenpoint as it “held too many memories” (25), she stays at an Airbnb there because it’s closer to her job. The City forces her to confront herself, and at every turn Wasko prefers to hide: sometimes even running back to her childhood home in Kingston to avoid looking into herself. 

This repression, naturally, inhibits her creativity. Writing is an expression of her chaos, and chaos is antithetical to being a functional member of society: therefore, throughout Meta Work, Wasko fails to write this very novel. We readers can see the way she’s holding back from herself. Wasko’s psyche and writing shine as a breathtaking whole during her worst moments of fear, exhaustion, and suicidal ideation, yet these are always short-cut. There is always work to do, rent to pay, and a need to keep moving; there’s no time for deep introspection nor emotion in Wasko’s life, only matter-of-fact compartmentalization, so there is none in her writing either. Wasko’s candor in refusing to fabricate what is missing, nor withhold from what is there, offers us a gut-wrenchingly authentic portrayal of what life is like as a flesh bag of trauma responses and unbalanced chemicals too busy surviving to heal. Imagery flits. Reality falls apart. Still, we know how Wasko feels about her absurd, confusing existence, and are helpless to watch her suffer.

Only after the death of her overworked father and the disabling of her mother due to electroconvulsive therapy does Wasko find her turmoil too heavy to ignore. Only then does she recognize, she must heal through expression. Through surrender to her inner self, engaging deeply and intimately with her desire to write, Wasko transcends her hatred of chaos—symbolized literally by the finishing of this book and the subsequent burning of a previous (failed) draft. She embraces the surreal nature of her life and revels in the blurred lines between fact and fiction, writing:

“I stood on the edge of the platform, and I vomited, and I cried, and I wretched, and I screamed, and I let go. I’m standing by myself at the track in the subway station at Grand Central, and this didn’t really happen, but it happened here on the page, and therefore it happened… It may not be factually true, but it is emotionally true. The experience of fiction and fact healed me.” (71) 

The final chapter skips several long years into the future, where Wasko has built herself a life wholly surrounded by writing.  She now “loves” (Wasko 81) the chaos, understanding that healing from it has served as a powerful driving force for her creativity. For, as Wasko writes in her introduction, “The truth is the chaos itself… This is meta-work” (5). 

Meta Work is available from Planet Dust Enterprises

SINDUS Kim (any/all) is a writer & fan of the odd, off-putting, and preternatural. Though they have a penchant for fiction and CNF/essays, their Word document dedicated to bad poems about their ex-girlfriend well-exceeds fifty pages. You can find him at his completely empty Instagram and Twitter @sinducated, or her website, where she’s open to all kinds of small talk and inquiries.