[codingthebeach]

I've always thought of a lot of DFW's writing as a kind of programming. There's the main narrative thread of whatever he's talking about at a given time-slice, then there are the "worker threads" he spins off from that in the form of random lateral jumps to stream-of-consciousness, the 24-page footnote containing a single run-on sentence, etc. Certainly in IJ, and to a lesser degree in his other works, there are multiple "paths" the thread of execution can take to reach the end of the book. Put another way: are DFW's footnotes intended to be read synchronously or asynchronously? If you read them synchronously, it tends to interrupt the flow of the main narrative (context switches are expensive). If you read them asynchronously, you miss a lot of context and, possibly, the author's intended ordering/synchronization of the ideas. And of course all of this is intentional, and gives his writing a "meta" dimension that standard English don't usually have (usually for good reasons).