bookofjoe now free

From time to time I hear from readers who resent what I charge to read my exclusive material.

Frankly I think it's cheap at twice the price but I would think that, wouldn't I?

Nevertheless, I do listen to you, you know: after all, if I didn't I'd be the only one here.

And then who would I think was talking to me?

"You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here."

But I digress.

Though I do think that scene

in "Taxi Driver" is one of my all-time Top 10 favorites.

Anyway, starting right now, with this post, bookofjoe is abandoning all requirements for payment.

This is, for the time being at least, a cost-free environment.

What occasioned this new policy?

A fascinating piece by Rebecca Mead I read in "The Talk of the Town" section of the March 18 New Yorker.

She wrote about a new Indian restaurant called Babu on Macdougal Street in New York that opened earlier this year.

For its first few weeks the restaurant had no prices on its menus.

Guests were invited to eat and then pay what they thought the meal was worth.

The restaurant's owner, Payal Saha, told Mead, "I'd rather work out the kinks in the kitchen first. It leaves a bad taste in people's mouths if they have to pay and things don't go right. I have assumed that everyone will pay me zero."

Turns out the pay-what-you-like policy caused anxiety among diners so it was scrapped in late February in favor of the usual style of listing the price of things.

I like this experiment not because it caused anxiety but, rather, because it created uncertainty.

Anything that takes routine and ordinary things and suddenly renders them unpredictable gets us closer to a sense of what the universe, life, and meaning are about.

I will do my level and unbalanced best to make the experience of visiting bookofjoe as disorienting for you as it is for me to create it.

To attempt any less would be to value you less than I do myself: such lack of respect for you and all you are and do is something you might experience elsewhere — but it will never happen on my watch here.

And that's all I have to say about that.