Birth of a Zimbu by Christopher Schulz is another addition to the growing collection of artworks based on William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys (1971), in this case a 52-page collection of “visual reveries made from collaged parts of dated gay porn, ancient ruins, and other various unrelated sources.” The book costs $10 and may be previewed and ordered here.
The Zimbus are Burroughs’ solution to the problem of reproduction (or regeneration) among the Wild Boys, his army of eternal teenage boys at war with the world at large in a dystopian 1988. Warfare means casualties so in order to maintain their homosocial, homoerotic tribal existence they gather at special times to perform sex-magic rituals that summon the “Zimbu” spirit forms of dead Wild Boys. The Zimbus are incarnated as new Wild Boys after being inseminated and fully materialised.
Burroughs wasn’t short on fantastic concepts but his ideas are often delivered and dismissed in a few lines. By contrast, the creation of the Zimbus is given pages of detailed description, the separatist, semi-human world of the Wild Boys being one to which he devoted a great deal of imaginative attention. I’ve linked before to Phil Hine’s essay, Zimbu Xototl Time, which examines the Zimbu idea at some length, drawing comparisons to similar ideas in anthropology and other fiction. If I ever get round to finished the long-gestating Wild Boys portfolio I may be able to show some Zimbu manifestations of my own.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Seward/Howard
• Thot-Fal’N, a film by Stan Brakhage
• Mr Bradly Mr Martin Hear Us Through The Hole In Thin Air
• The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, a film by Gerrit van Dijk
• Burroughs at 100
• Nova Express, a film by Andre Perkowski
• Decoder, a film by Jürgen Muschalek
• The Burroughs Century
• Interzone: A William Burroughs Mix
• Sine Fiction
• The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera
• Burroughs: The Movie revisited
• Zimbu Xolotl Time
• Ah Pook Is Here
• Jarek Piotrowski’s Soft Machine
• Looking for the Wild Boys
• Wroblewski covers Burroughs
• Mugwump jism
• Brion Gysin’s walk, 1966
• Burroughs in Paris
• William Burroughs interviews
• Soft machines
• Burroughs: The Movie
• William S Burroughs: A Man Within
• The Final Academy
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire