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David Foster Wallace

‘… that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train’s survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents is beyond sociohistorical dispute, though the precise ideological relation between the B.S. era’s simultaneously chivalric and nihilistic Cult of the Train’s savage tournaments and the present’s limbless cell of anti-O.N.A.N. extremists remains the subject of the same scholarly debate that surrounds the evolution of northern Quebec’s La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin into the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de Montcalm cell credited with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled, pie shell onto the rostrum of U.S. President Gentle’s second Inaugural.

‘As with the La Culte du Prochain Train, the Cult of the Endless Kiss of the iron mining regions surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coalesced around a periodic, tournament style competition, this one comprised of 64 adolescent Canadian participants, of whom one half were female.6 Thus, the first round pitted 32 couples, each of which consisted of one male and one female Quebecker.’ Struck is trying to phone Hal, but gets only his room’s wearisome phone-machine-message; can you ever say pitted without some kind of against in there someplace later in the sentence? Struck envisions the Wild Conceit scholar utterly strafed by this time, the guy’s eyes crossed and his head lolling and having to cover one eye with a hand just to see a single screen, and typing with his nose. But with the apparent self-destructive credulity that characterizes many plagiarists, no matter how gifted, Struck goes ahead and puts in the complementless pitted, imagining forehand and backhand slaps all the while. ‘Of each pair, one half, designated by lot, filled his or her lungs to capacity with inhaled air, while the other exhaled maximally to empty his or hers. Their mouths were then fitted together and quickly sealed by an

6 Except in certain very esoteric variations on the game.

organizing cultist with occlusive tape, who then expertly employed the thumb and forefinger of both hands to seal the combatants’ nostrils. Thus, the battle of the Endless Kiss had been joined. The entire lung contents of the designatedly inhaled player was then exhaled orally into the emptied lungs of his or her opponent, who in turn exhaled the inhalation back to its original owner, and so forth, back and forth, the same air being traded back and forth, with oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios becoming progressively more Spartan, until the organizer holding their nostrils closed officially declared one combatant or the other to be “evanoui” or, “swooned,” either fallen to the ground or out on his or her feet. The theoretics of the contest lends itself to an appreciation of the patient, attritive, grinding down tactics of traditional Quebecois Séparatisteurs such as Les Fils de Montcalm and the Fronte de la Liberation du Quebec, as opposed to the viciousness and brinksmanship of “Le Prochain Train”‘s Root Cult’s disabled heirs. The figurative object of the “Bai$ser” competition appears---according to Phelps and Phelps---to involve using what one is given with maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance before excreting it back whence it came, a stoic stance toward waste utilization that the Phelps somewhat cavalierly employ to illuminate the Montcalmistes’ relative indifference to a continental Reconfiguration that constitutes Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents’ whole “raison de la guerre outrance” b