This is Patrick Simpson’s personal blog and internet experiment, Experiments in the Rhizome (EitR). Patrick Simpson is also the one writing the words you are currently reading: hello! I’m a writer and artist.
I began this project because I wanted a less boring, more engaged and anarchic way of using the internet. I wanted to carve out a space against the new “slop internet“—in other words, a space dedicated to human value over profit maximization, one that will not attempt to hijack your attention (there will never be ads or algorithmic recommendation here), and also one in which I can share virtually any kind of creative work without feeling beholden to the algorithmically-influenced “content” machines of most social media platforms.
The website is intended to function like an English garden, encouraging variety and idle walks along rambling paths—or at least, this is the simile I tend to use most (though the English garden’s connection to English nationalism also nauseates me a little). I also like comparing the blog to a labyrinth (with a minotaur somewhere inside, perhaps?). The “paths” of the garden and/or labyrinth are hyperlinks, which can be found embedded in the text of most posts/pages. Some links lead to other pages on the blog. Others lead outside of it: the garden paths extending into the wider landscape of the internet.
Here are a few links to what I consider to be some of my most interesting and compelling fiction writing at the moment: new paths into the garden. If you continue following paths through the blog, you might chance upon some other stories and essays and what-not (usually but not always authored by me), and maybe even a few secrets…
- “The Hole”
- My attempt at achieving something similar to what David Foster Wallace achieved in his story “Forever Overhead,” a beautiful, vivid rendering of a 13-year-old boy willing himself to take the high dive at the pool on his birthday, the story using the second-person “you” for the character (though my story also departs from the Wallace inspiration at a certain point…).
- “Walking and Falling”
- A much shorter story, with a title borrowed from Laurie Anderson.
- “The Subways”
- Weird: give it a shot, if you’re so inclined. I wrote this thinking of the dense and mystical style of Jorge Luis Borges, though I’m not sure how much that influence comes through in the final story.
A couple other notes before I sign off. For one, I very much welcome submissions to the blog. I encourage the weird and radical, leftist and grassroots politics, and art for art’s sake—in essence, creative work with human value. To repeat a line from Deleuze and Guattari I’ve quoted before: “don’t have just ideas, just have ideas!”
I’d also like to acknowledge that the garden is in need of some renewed cultivation. In April last year, I wrote a “Rhizomatic Manifesto” introducing the blog and my intentions regarding it, which manifesto I would now like to update. I will be uploading a more involved essay on my current (somewhat less bombastic, though still radical) vision for this website in the near future. I hope you’ll stick around.
It is my greatest hope that your attention will be rewarded richly here. As the author, most of that burden falls on me, but some of it also falls on you, dear reader. Make of this space what you will. And please, Feel Free!