Max "Bunny" Sparber

A SONG about the pleasures and disappointments of meeting somebody new.

"HAPPY DAY" LYRICS

I met her once at a party
When I brought her some wine
She said I think that I know you
I think I met you online
It was a happy day
It was a happy day

Every morning I woke up
To a dozen emails
That she wrote after midnight
Filled with breathless details
It was a happy day
It was a happy day

She'd laugh when she saw me
And say let's drink until dawn
But her phone would then ring ring
And then she'd be gone
It was a happy day
It was a happy day

She'd go weeks without calling
And my calls were ignored
She'd say she was busy
Her status message said bored
It was a happy day
It was a happy day

Every once in a while now
I will see her online
And she sends me a message:
"I want to see you sometime"
It was a happy day
It was a happy day

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I HAVE A FEW THOUGHTS bouncing around in the old coconut, and tonight seems like a good night to clear my head of them. I am going to be interviewing MinnPost's David Brauer later today. David went from old school journalism to online journalism a few years ago, and I suspect a lot of what we are going to be talking about is the Web, and the still-uncertain future of journalism in this new medium.

I also come out of what people have started calling "dead tree" journalism -- the same place David started, in the world of alternative newsweeklies. And here we are, at what may actually be the death of print. I mean, certainly, there will still be newspapers. But I don't think they will ever be the cultural institution, or wield the power, or make the money, they once did. The Internet has ended that, and me might just have to learn to live with that fact.

But I don't want to discuss online journalism just yet. I'll leave that for David to discuss tomorrow. Instead, I want to talk about two things in my life that have been utterly transformed as a result of the Web, and I think for the better. These transformations are starting to effect the way I think about everything I attempt, so it seems like a good idea to jot them down now, when they're burbling in my brain banana.

First of all, for me, the Web has meant the end of tyranny of proximity. There was a time when we were mostly bound by our physical environment. I mean, sure, there were telephones, and you could send letters, and telegrams. But the truth was, if you were like me, you only called people you already knew, and you might have one or two friends you had made via letters, but these were hard to maintain. You tended to make friends based on whatever location you were in, and, for the most part, the extent of those relationship had very real physical borders. And I speak as someone who has maintained long-distance friendships for decades. These friendships were always with people I had met and become close with face to face first, and they suffered from the distance.

Right now, I would say my network consists of 2,000 people. Of my immediate peer group, I would say roughly 70 percent of them I met online first. Of my entire network, I would guess that I have not actually met maybe 20 or 30 percent of people I regularly communicate with, and probably have met more than 50 percent only once or twice. I have developed some very strong friendships with people that I only know online, and I spend a lot of my time in one of several online forums, or participating in social media. My network of friends is now primarily defined by common interests, rather than the coincidence of location. There are still some boundaries -- most of my new friends are Minnesota-based, but I would say that's because, if you are pursuing common interests, it often helps to actually be able to meet up every now and again. And I'd say a certain sort of digital proximity also tends to kick in. While I am no longer friends with people simply because of the coincidence of us living nearby, I do have a number of acquaintanceships with people with whom I have very little in common but for that we are all bloggers. But, in general, I would say it has become easier than ever before to pursue friendships with likeminded people without concern for physical closeness, and that's a relatively new development in human history.

The second topic I would like to touch on is the power of this publishing platform -- of blogging specifically, but of the digital world in general. Just as the Web has started to wear away at relationships based on proximity, it has also started to erase creativity based on permission. Up until very recently, any creative opportunity you had would involve asking permission from somebody else. If you had a band and wanted to play music, you would generally submit a tape to a booking agent, who would hire you or not. If you wanted to wrote a book, you had to write the thing, and then submit it to a publisher, and then, if they were so inclined, they would eventually get around the writing you a terse note saying that your book wasn't right for their company, but thank you for submitting.

That's no longer the case. The Internet has made it possible -- easy even -- to publish whatever you like online and find a readership. Now, sure, there is no business model for doing so. Almost nobody who publishes online sees more than a few pennies for their work. But I think some of this is that the people who used to produce culture, and who made money from it, created a sort of false scarcity. They published everything that was worth reading -- in fact, with the consolidation of corporate control of the media in the past few decades, they produced almost everything available for consumption, mediawise. If you wanted to hear well-recorded music, you generally had to buy it from a record company, as it was prohibitively expensive for independent acts to record, press, and distribute their own albums (although many did so anyway.) They produced a limited number of albums in a year, and hey set the prices for these records, and it was as high as the marker could bear. People were willing to pay 10 times the printing cost, because, if they wanted music, this was the only way most of them could get it. And how did they maintain these artificially high prices? By saying no. They would refuse permission. Permission to make music. Permission to press more than a certain number of records. Permission to seel them at a reasonable price, or give them away for free.

No longer. Anybody can write anything they like, or record anything they like, or film anything they like. The equipment is cheap, it can all be done on a laptop computer, and it can all be put online to find its audience.

Sure, there is no model for making money doing this yet. The false scarcity that was partially responsible for previous prices has collapsed. There is culture everywhere online, and much of it is excellent. And much of it is free. (Depending on how unscrupulous you may be, it can all be free.) And so the money is gone, and nobody knows what model may work to replace the previous one and make money online.

If you're like me, though, this is an incredibly exciting time. Because this astounding publishing platform has been given us with very few restriction, if any. And suddenly it is no longer necessary to ask anybody's permission to create, duplicate, and distribute anything. We can be our own newspapers, or record companies, or publishing houses, or whatever else you can imagine, and we can do it fast and cheap and increasing well.

I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff, bu, then, I'm online and don't have a business model that the Web is in the process of breaking. Suddenly, if I want to review a film I can, and then go home and record a song and publish it online, all within hours.

I can't help but think this is a good thing. Because, historically, the gatekeepers to American culture -- the people you had to ask for permission, and could say no -- were defined by greed, small-mindedness, a lack of a sense of adventure, and a built-in incentive to say no, in that it kept culture scarce enough to make money off of.

Good riddance to them, I say. I'm the publisher now. We all are. And, for better or worse, that's our future. I tend to think it's better. I don;t make much money on my creative work anyway, so what do I have to lose by self-publishing?

They're the ones who have a lot to lose. They make a lot of money by saying no to us. I think it's time they made less money and we heard "no" less from them, and that's already happening, because we no longer need o beg them for permission.

More from The Arts Writer.

REPUBLISHED FROM an earlier blog, and written upon receiving word of Ms. Winters' death in 2006.

My first play was written for a program for homeless teenagers in Hollywood begun by Shelley Winters, who died today at age 85.

I knew her for about 10 months back in 1991 or thereabouts, when she began teaching classes at the Teen Canteen on Hollywood Boulevard. This was a program administrated by Travelers Aid, a program mostly for homeless and indigent adults. I had stayed for a short while at a shelter in Hollywood when I moved out there at age 21, and was renting an apartment through the Teen Canteen when Ms Winters started an acting course for homeless teens. I had moved out to Hollywood in the hopes of being a screenwriter, and my caseworker knew it, and invited me to participate in the program. "What's Shelley Winters like?" I asked.

"She's like a bag lady," my caseworker told me. "With money."

Her acting class met weekly at the Teen Canteen, which was then located just off Hollywood and Vine. The class consisted mostly of improvisational exercises, which were enjoyable. Miss Winters persisted in calling me "Mac," which she would then apologize for, explaining that she once had a husband named Mac. Her students were a dozen or so homeless teenagers, most living either in shelters or empty buildings in the Hollywood area, and it was never the same group from week to week, but for me.

She regaled us with tales of old Hollywood. I remember one story about her going to Las Vegas with Anthony Quinn and winning an enormous amount of money. Qunn offered her some advice about her winnings: "If you ever want to win again in Las Vegas, you have to leave the money here." So she bought herself something terrifically expensive -- A car? A fur? My memory fails me. Spending the money seemed to work, as Ms. Winters declared that she continued to win every time she went to Vegas.

Ms. Winters wanted to do a production of Clifford Odets' pro-union play Waiting for Lefty starring homeless teenagers. She explained that she viewed the early 90s as comparable to the Great Depression, and she saw Hollywood's homeless as being akin to the Depression's Hooverville residents. We would occasionally read from the script for Lefty in class, and Ms. Winters brought in several people to assist her, two of them being Clare Carey, a young actress who was then appearing on the sitcom Coach, and singer/songwriter Bonnie Bramlett, who was then appearing in a recurring role along with Miss Winters in Roseanne. Shelley Winters took a several month leave of absence to work on a movie called The Pickle, leaving the program with the instruction that we should work on Lefty, and also develop a second one-act based on the actual experiences of the homeless teenagers in the program.

I was approached about writing the second script, and agreed, and through a laborious, unsatisfying, often contentious process involving improvisational exercises I wrote a script initially titled Mondo Abode, but later retitled Santa Muerte, after the death card in the Spanish tarot deck. I needn't detail this any more, as I have written about it somewhat in the notes for The Substitute Bride, except to say that Ms. Winters demurred to continue with the project and abandoned her own acting program when we seemed determined to continue with it.

I will say that my memories of Ms. Winters are mixed. She was mercurial, at one moment doting, in mother hen-fashion, on the teenagers in the program, at other times exhibiting a lack of concern for them that was positively shocking. I remember one incident that to this day galls me, in which a young girl in the program complained of severe stomach pains during an acting class. She was in such agony that she could hardly stand, and, grudgingly, Miss Winters offered her a ride to the hospital. I agreed to accompany her. Winters took us to Beverly Hills, where the Cedars Sinai Hospital is, not far from where she lived. However, as it turned out, the hospital was a little too far from where Winters lived. When we reached the turn to her home, she unceremoniously stopped the car and informed us that this was as far as she felt comfortable taking us. The hospital was just a few blocks away, and we would have to walk the rest.

We did so, the girl groaning in agony, leaning heavily on me the entire way, stopping every few steps and grimacing. When we got to the emergency room, the doctors took over, and I waited for several hours to get word on the girl. Finally, a doctor told me I needn't wait around any longer, the girl was going to spend the night in the hospital. She was all right, the doctor informed me, but she was having a miscarriage.

Ms. Winters was very upset about the script I had written for the program, protesting that it was "psychodrama" and the script, which detailed some of the actual violence teenagers experienced on the street, would damage the homeless teenagers who might perform the role. We went to her house for a meeting about it, and she repeatedly sent me out of the room to perform little tasks for her, such as making tea, while she talked in a lowered voice with the Teen Canteen people about her concerns about my script. I remember that the mantle to her house had a photo on it of Miss Winters with Marilyn Monroe. Next to it was an Academy Award and a menorah. When we left Winters' house that night, she hugged me and wished me a happy Hannukah. We had managed to talk Winters into coming to, and participating in, several rehearsals of my play. She came to one and then washed her hands of the program.

I remember walking down Hollywood Boulevard with Ms. Winters. While we walked, she leaned on me for support. A thin man saw us approaching and began shouting, pointing at her. "Oh, no!" he shouted. "It's not you! Is it you? It's not you!" Winters seemed flustered by this, throwing up an arm defensively. "It's me!" she shouted, and the man followed us as we walked, pointing and saying "It's you! It's you!"

I remember that Ms. Winters often seemed to be in bad health and terrible pain. She came to one of our rehearsals with an inflatable mattress. She usually had a few young women working as assistants, and one of them set up the mattress for her, and Winters lay on it. She seemed to be asleep throughout the rehearsal, which was for the script that I had written, and she despised. I had written a small role for her in it, and, when it was time for her character to speak, she read the dialogue feebly, in a small voice, never moving from her near-catatonic state on the air mattress.

I had based Winters' dialogue on things she had actually said to me, so her character often complained. "Oh, my back," her character would cry out. "It's very difficult for me to walk, dear, because I have this very sharp pain in my back." When Winters feebly read this dialogue, her assistants burst out laughing, and then looked embarrassed. One of them shot me a conspiratorial look. "You're very naughty for writing dialogue like that," this assistant later told me.

Shelley Winters always dies in her movies. I am sure that there are some exceptions, but not many. Quite a few of these films are great: As an example, there is Night of the Hunter, which includes the astounding image of Winters seated in an old jalopy at the bottom of a lake, her throat cut, her hair swirling around her in the water. Some of her other films, such as The Poseidon Adventure, are camp spectacles -- to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, in this movie you would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Shelley Winters. But her deaths were always memorable, perhaps a bit too memorable: When I knew her, if I mentioned the fact, people disbelieved me. "She's dead, isn't she?" they would ask. Perhaps this is why the thin fellow on Hollywood Boulevard was so astounded to see Winters. Up until that moment, he was sure she was dead.

Well, she really is dead now, and she leaved behind a fascinating legacy. It's hard to think of another actress who was willing to be as shrill onscreen as she was. Her character in Lolita is so phony, so needy, so nauseatingly insinuating that it is hard not to wish for her death, as Humbert Humbert does. She shrieked her way through untold exploitation films in the Sixties and Seventies, playing characters so unrepentantly grating that they were almost always villains. In one of her Academy Award-winning performances, she appeared in The Diary of Anne Frank, her character was doltish, selfish, whining, and dangerous, in that nobody could spend any time secreted in a hidden annex with her without wanting to flee and turn themselves over the the Gestapo. And one senses that these acting choices were deliberate, and therefore courageous. Winters was not oblivious to the fact that her characters were often monsters, neither she afraid to exaggerate those elements that made them monstrous, and there are very contemporary few actresses today willing to be so beastly and unattractive onscreen.

In fact, she could often be relied on to go too far, which is why her exploitation vehicles, such as Wild in the Streets and Cleopatra Jones so hysterical. Watch these films to see Winters' typical acting tics, which include bellowing, wheedling, and whining, at full volume. It's like her goal in these films was to create some sort of epic, unmatched archetype of the obnoxious female -- and she hasn't been topped to this day.

I would never have worked with her again, as she had some of those same exact obnoxious habits in life. But, God, am I glad others were willing to, because she was such a fantastically watchable character. Who else could be as appallingly neurotic and so massively shrill onscreen? Who will play these roles now that she's gone?

Today, American film lost a giant. A vulgar, husky, self-absorbed, blowzy, caterwauling, churlish, magnificent giant.

More plays of Max Sparber.

A SONG ABOUT STRIPPERS WHO BLOG

"THE MEN THE BOOZE THE COCAINE AND THE GRIND" LYRICS

Jeni got a job in an adult club
Styled after an English pub
Where they served lamb and toplessness
Every day when she came home
And Jeni had a few minutes alone
She'd sit at her computer and decompress

Jnni felt like a rock and roll star
On the computer screen
As she wrote down every detail on her mind
Jeni she would then
Blog about it all
The men the booze the cocaine and the grind

Jeni was a keen observer
Of every man that didn't deserve her
The bores the smirkers the perverts and the punks
After a day of salacious gyrations
She'd back report all her observations
Alone and mean and exhausted and quite drunk

Jeni felt like a rock and roll star
On the computer screen
As she wrote down every detail on her mind
Jeni she would then
Blog about it all
The men the booze the cocaine and the grind

There was Mike who never once tipped
When he sat at the stage and watched the girls strip
And Jon he was such a regular tool
Because he couldn't obey the do not touch rule
Tim would come in with his girlfriend
And she'd pay for his dances and he'd make her spend
And the DJ was a creep and the manager had a gun
And Jeni she blogged about every one

Jeni got a job in an adult club
Styled after an English pub
She worked there for a year and three weeks
Her managers one day found her Web page
And fired her while she was dancing onstage
As she left Jeni said well fuck off creeps

Jeni felt like a rock and roll star
On the computer screen
As she wrote down every detail on her mind
Jeni she would then
Blog about it all
The men the booze the cocaine and the grind

LISTEN TO "THE MEN THE BOOZE THE COCAINE AND THE GRIND":



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A SONG about making the most of the Internet. Lyrics mildly NSFW.

NSFW LYRICS:

NSFW
Ain't no need to tell me any more
NSFW
Maybe it's time that we explore

Waitaminute Anne and Samara
Let me get the digital camera
Let's get your clothes off in the lights
You kiss her and I'll kiss you
There is so much we can do
When we're filling 16 gigabytes

NSFW
What the hell are we waiting for
NSFW
The Internet was intended for hardcore

Please hand me those ice cubes and
We'll do things that are banned on YouTube
Lean down please and let me get this shot
I'll kiss you and you kiss her and
Nobody will believe its amateur
Nobody will question if it's hot or not

NSFW
The bed, the couch, the counter and the floor
NSFW
Slap that ass until it's good and sore

Everybody searching the information freeway
All looking for an unusual three-way
That can't be found on wikipedia
Streaming through a million iMacs
Will be images of our thunderous climax
Let's create some social media

NSFW
What the hell are we waiting for
NSFW
The Internet was intended for hardcore

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I DON'T KNOW WHY I wrote about every single chapter in How to Win Friends and Influence People. I don't recall making the decision to do so, and, halfway through it, I realized that it was a hell of an undertaking, especially since my interest in the book was mostly about how to win friends, and not so much about how to influence people.

That being said, I think it was worth it, if only to internalize Carnegie's text in a way that just reading it wouldn't have done. I'm not sure that I have grasped the philosophy behind the book. As I mentioned at the start, sometimes the book seems to be the product of a man who thinks people are essentially small, petty creatures who cannot be trusted with logic and with plain talk. But sometimes Carnegie seems to argue that his suggestions are rooted in respecting the other person, and that part of our job is to understand them and give their viewpoints a fair hearing. These viewpoints are not necessarily incompatible with each other, but they're not an easy match for each other either. It is possible to see humanity cynically and nonetheless believe they deserve to be treated with respect, but I have found cynicism and compassion are rarely bedfellows.

Ultimately, I suppose it doesn't matter if Carnegie had a consistent worldview, or even what his viewpoint was at all. He is very much a pragmatist, and he suggests these techniques because he has found them to work. It is to his credit that he is not exclusively a cynic and that his suggestions are constantly tempered with earnest demands that people be given a fair shake. I have mentioned that I think the book could have used a clearer discussion of ethics, because it is possible to just pick and choose from Carnegie's suggestions, and some of them, without the tempering quality of compassion, can be used manipulatively -- indeed, some of his suggestions for influencing others are inherently manipulative. Nowhere in the book does Carnegie mount an appeal to reason. Instead, he seems to think that people won't respond to frank, honest conversation and must instead be convinced by gimmicks and appealing logical fallacies. I know these techniques work, but I do not trust them, as they are identical to the sorts of techniques demagogues have always used to sway their population. I may revisit Carnegie's chapters on persuasion at some point, but that is not the focus of this blog, so I will leave it alone for now.

My other complaint about the book is that it addresses itself to normal people interacting with other normal people. Despite Carnegie's cynicism about human nature, nowhere does he mention the fact that there are people who will not respond to his suggested techniques, or will attempt to abuse them. It was not Carnegie's job to create tools for handling misbehavor, but it might have been nice had he acknowledged that misbehavior exists and that his suggestions in the book might be exactly the wrong way to handle someone who is violent, or a con artist, or just straight-up off their rocker. You can agreeably differ with the opinion of a hate group, but that's not going to help much when they burn a cross on your lawn. And, to a lesser extent, his techniques are not especially helpful in dealing with loudmouths, bullying bosses, drunks, panhandlers, disappointed parents, and the myriad of others who must be handled with special techniques, because all of them will, to some extent, ignore or take advantage of politeness and brush off gentle persuasion.

But oh well. Let's instead discuss what Carnegie does offer, and what I have already begun to work on, and what I need to work on.

First of all, I have been working on making a smile my default facial expression. I realized that I tend to look away from people and offer up a very thin, strained smile, and I did this without thinking. Well, that's not a friendly smile. At best, it looks forced and shy. At worst, it looks vaguely peeved. So I have been trying to offer wide, genuine smiles to people. I don't know how long this will take to become a habit. It's something I really have to struggle to remember now.

Speaking of memory, I have also been working to remember people's names, with some success. These are the first two of Carnegie's suggestions that I have made a concerted effort to adopt, and until I feel I have them pretty well nailed down, I don't think I will be dedicating myself to any other new behavior. Nonetheless, when I remember, I also try to spend more time listening in a conversation than talking, and being complementary to people, and not being critical. This is a lot to master, so I am trying to have some patience with myself for when I still sometimes launch into an annoyed tirade, or take over a conversation and don't let it go, or forget to say something nice. I will make these things priorities in their own times.

Once I feel I have a pretty good handle, I'll revisit this section and report back on how effective it may or may not be, and decide what other of Carnegie's suggestions I want to try and make a habit. But, for now, I'll be moving on to other aspects of the Bunny Charm School. It's a big subject, and I am ready to explore a new topic.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

NOWADAYS, when you read How to Win Friends and Influence People, once you reach the end of the section titled "Be a Leader," Dale Carnegie is done with you. Go out there, make new friends, offer up some mild disagreements that are bound to be taken well, and gently correct your inferiors! You're ready for the world!

That was not always the case. I have in my possession a copy of Win Friends from 1964, and it is not substantially different from Carnegie's original, 1936 version. I don't really care to detail the differences in the part of the books that remain in the modern version -- some new anecdotes have been added, a few have been removed, and some language has been updated. Carnegie was a man of his time, and so there were few women in the workplace, and often in positions that were pretty gendered, so his language reflects that. The new editions were right to update that.

No, what interests me is that there are two complete sections that have been excised.

The first is an entire section encompassed in a very short and somewhat weird chapter called "Letters That Produce Miraculous Results." But this section isn't about letters; not really. Instead, it focuses on a little technique Ben Franklin developed to get into people's good graces: He asked them to do a little favor for him. Carnegie doesn't detail the logic behind this too much, but it's a rather famous technique called the Ben Franklin Effect. Essentially, what Franklin discovered is that someone who has done you a small favor once is more likely to do another favor later -- even more likely that if you had done a favor for them. This has actually been demonstrated in scientific studies. Dunno why it works, but it does. This section is entirely gone from new editions, and I'm not sure why.

The next section consists of "Seven Rules for Making Your Home Life Happier," some of which has been bundled into other chapters in the revised book, as they repeat earlier principals but simply apply them to marriage. Carnegie's rules, if I may paraphrase slightly, are as follows:

1. Jesus, woman, why do you have to be such a freaking nag?
2. Maybe it would be nice to compliment your wife every so often, you insensitive lout
3. Flowers might be a good idea every now and again
4. You're rude and you should stop it
5. And, by the way, you suck in bed, and maybe it's time you, I don't know, read a book about it or something

There are, of course, very broad paraphrases, but they do effectively sum up his points. I guess the people in charge of Carnegie's estate didn't really feel a marriage manual was required at the end of the book, especially one that supported a dated understanding of gender roles. (Carnegie is especially annoyed by nagging, which he casts as being an essentially female behavior.) Some of the advice still seems pretty good though. If you consider nagging to be a behavior that both men and women can be equally guilty of, then his advice to not nag is still worth listening.

Also, I suspect a lot of lovers are still bad in bed. Read a book -- it can only help. Back when I was in my early 20s, girls I knew used to make fun of me for reading things like The Sensuous Man. But they stopped teasing when the night was over and they had crawled on their back across the bed, up the wall, and across the ceiling.

That's right. Call me, ladies.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

OH MY GOD, the last chapter of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Well, sort of. I will be doing two more posts about Dale Carnegie, at least: one brief one about the chapters of his book that have not made it to modern editions, and a postmortem of what I have learned. But this is the last post about the contents of current editions of Dale Carnegie's books, and he end it with a lesson that we all probably learned from the fence whitewashing scene from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

Make the other person happy about the thing you suggest.

Carnegie isn't even as tricky as the Sawyer boy was, recommending, instead, that you provide some sort of reward for work done. One example of this: paying someone, and paying them enough that they are glad for the work. He also mentions Napoleon, who apparently passed out medals like Mardi Gras parade throws, and shrugged off criticism, saying "Men are ruled by toys." Carnegie also tells of a grocery clerk who was very bad at putting price tags on food until she was made the Supervisor of Price Tag Posting, at which time her tagging improved dramatically.

So what do we learn? Bribe people, with money, trinkets, or titles, and they'll do what you want. This is hardly a surprising conclusion to a book that seems to posit that people are selfish, small-minded, and only respond to calls for ethical behavior when it can be used to support doing things they already want to do. It's also not surprising that it probably works better than most other motivational techniques.

And, most interestingly, to me, although Carnegie never says it outright, whatever the seemingly cynical logic behind Carnegie's suggestion, the result is that people who work will get some sort of reward. They deserve it. I am starting to wonder if this chapter, and much of the book, isn't some sort of strange ploy to get people to treat each other better, and reward them when they deserve to get rewarded, with thanks, money, gifts, praise, and, most importantly, with respect. If that was your plan all along, Dale Carnegie, well, good for you. I don't know how well many of your suggestions have been implemented in the real world, and there are a few I am not mad for, but there genuinely does seem to be a subtle, but constant, effort to encourage greater respect and understanding between people.

I have a feeling that Carnegie's book may be worth revisiting every so often, once I have successfully implemented the suggestions from him that make sense to me. I might come back and decide that some of what I have been trying doesn't work for me, and some of what I initially dismissed now seems to make a lot of sense. Until then, I have a feeling that whichever of his suggestions I can implement, and however much success I might have implementing them, it's going to make me an easier guy to get along with, and one who has an easier time getting along with others. At the very least, I expect I'll smile more, and that alone is probably worth the eight bucks I paid for the book.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

I USED TO GO OUT with a very sweet and creative young women who nonetheless had a habit of presenting complaints about me as though there was just something essentially wrong with me. "I think it's just who you are," she would say, and then sigh with pity at the tragedy of me.

This got to be a bit much after a while, and so we sat down and agreed that we would never go to each other with a complaint unless we also went with a suggestion for a solution. Carnegie goes one better: You should not only approach with a solution, but you should make the solution sound easy to do: Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.

I know there are, in fact, problems out there that are very hard to correct, and, in fact, take years of work. And I know how discouraging this can be; after all, I grow tired of things after only a few months and tend to just give up on things, and don't think that's unusual.

But, then, a lot of big problems are made up of a series of smaller problems working in collaboration. For instance, someone who is messy isn't just messy. They have a collection of bad habits, each of which are simpler to solve. They may not make the bed regularly, for instance, or do the dishes as often as they should, or hang up their clothes every time. And by "they," of course I mean "I." Just changing one or two of these things seems pretty easy, and while it doesn't solve the problem as a whole, it does make the apartment seem considerably tidier. Which reminds me: I forgot to make the bed.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

THE ACTUAL ADVICE Dale Carnegie gives in this chapter is as follows:

Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

However, his pithy advice appears at the end of his chapters, and aren't his chapter titles. I haven't mentioned his titles before, because they tend to sound like the sort of titles you find in every self-help book: Do This and You'll Be Welcome Anywhere;A Simple Way to Make a Good Impression; etc.

I like this title, however, because it is the second time in two chapters that Carnegie has compared people to dogs.

I know he doesn't mean to be insulting by this. Carnegie really, really loved dogs, after all; he started the book off with an unfortunately abbreviated story about how desperately he cared about his childhood dog and how traumatized he was when the pooch was electrocuted by lightning strike just a few inches from his head. But most people don't like to be compared to dogs, and it amuses me that Carnegie does so anyway. Hey, I've been doing this book chapter by chapter for what feels like a month now; you'll have to forgive me if it's making me a little punchy.

Carnegie didn't invent the phrase he is referencing. He quotes it as "Give a dog a bad name and you may as well hang him," which is a very old proverb indeed -- I find a version of it in Reverend Ray's A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs from 1768, which I happen to have on the bookshelf I call the Internet, although Ray phrases it thusly: "He that would hang his dog gives out first that he is mad." Apparently, there was a time when people really wanted to hang dogs, and spent time thinking about how to best justify it. Obviously, this distressed the dog-loving Carnegie, so he has come up with his own phrase which can be used to save dogs. And people, as follows:

If you want to improve a person in a certain respect, act as though that particular trait were already one of his or her outstanding characteristics.

I've never tried this, and so can't speak to its efficacy. I do know that the reverse is true -- that it is possible to change yourself just by behaving as though the change has already happened. In fact, I think you can change yourself merely by buying a hat and wearing it for a month. By the end of that month, you will have turned into the sort of person who would wear that hat. At least, that's true of me.

So I wonder, if you want to change someone for the better, maybe you could do it by buying them the appropriate hat? Hmm. I shall have to think about this.

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DALE CARNEGIE literally begins this chapter by comparing people to dogs. More precisely, he compares the way we spur people to success with the way we do with dogs. Dogs get little treats every time they do something right. People don't. Well, most people don't. Whenever I feel I have done something right, I buy myself some whiskey. And then, to congratulate myself on having done that, which feels so right, I buy myself another whiskey.

Carnegie's stance is obviously "criticize rarely and with great care, compliment often and effusively," and that seems like a pretty good policy. He feels so strongly about praising every single little improvement that his advice on the subject is uncommonly verbose:

Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise."

The quote in the last part is from Charles Schwab, who I am starting to think Carnegie had a bit of a man crush on. But Carengie's real inspiration in this chapter is not Schwab. It is B.F. Skinner, who argued that positive reinforcement is vastly superior to negative reinforcement, and positive reinforcement works best when it is frequent.

This may surprise anybody who is familiar with Skinner, as the Radical Behaviorist's theories on positive reinforcement were mostly published in the 1960s, and perhaps most clearly articulated in Technology of Teaching, published in 1968. Not only was How to Win Friends and Influence People published quite a bit earlier -- 1936, to be precise -- but Dale Carnegie died in 1955, 13 years before Skinner's book! But there he is, B.F Skinner, referenced in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Stranger still, the chapter also quotes Jess Lair, a shrink and self-help author who wrote a series of groovy books about how everybody is really okay and should loosen up a little, including I Ain't Much, Baby--But I'm all I Got, which was published in 1976.

Obviously, neither Skinner nor Lair were originally quote by Carnegie -- I have a much older copy of Win Friends and they are absent from it, having been added later. But Carnegie's philosophy apparently presaged both Radical Behaviorism and the Me Decade.

As it happens, I am sympathetic to Behaviorism, probably at least in part because my father is a Psychopharmacologist, and so I grew up around Skinner Boxes and with a copy of Walden Two in the house. Additionally, I think giving encouragement is just a nice thing to do. And I'm always happy when I've done something nice. Maybe I'll do something nice today. Then I'll go and buy myself a whiskey.

Wow. My post really came full-circle today.

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SOMETIMES IT IS HARD to nail down the underpinnings of Dale Carnegie's suggestions. This one, for instance. It sounds like, once again, he is concerned about roughing up someone's ego, which he has, in past chapters, made clear is an activity he thinks will be disastrous. People in Carnegie's world simply seem incapable of taking any criticism at all unless it is besweetened and debittered, if I can just make up two words to get my point across. So what do you do if you know you're going to wound someone's ego? "Let the other person save face."

But Carnegie actually gives his logic behind this directive, and it isn't the cynical, people-are-neurotics-who-can't-handle-criticism reasoning of many of his suggestions. No, instead he quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

A noble sentiment, and very appealing. Of course, it's a little hard to know if that is why Carnegie mentioned it. After all, in a previous chapter, he argues that we can influence people by making the things we want them to do sound noble. But, if this is an example of that, by gum, Carnegie is right! In the way he has phrased it, thanks to the quote by The Little Prince author, allowing others to save face DOES sound like an appealingly decent thing to do! Much more so than if he had simply said "People are going to FLIP OUT if you say one vaguely negative thing; here's how to control that a little."

Carnegie, you sly dog; you got me.

In the meanwhile, his suggestions are all of the "it's not you, it's me" kind, such as a company that would fire seasonal workers by telling them how awesome they were at the job and how very sorry they were that they couldn't keep the workers on. He also mentions a GE employee who was going to be stripped of a position, so they gave him a new, more impressive sounding title with less responsibilities, and he was flattered by it. Hey, it's kind of sneaky, but if de Saint-Exupéry says it's the way to be nice, then it's probably a good idea.

An why not? I really am of the opinion that we should avoid hurting people whenever possible. Sometimes little social fictions like these are just good manners.

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CARNEGIE EXPECTS PEOPLE TO BRISTLE when they are given orders. No one likes them, he warns: "Resentment caused by a brash order may last a long time."

He recommends asking questions instead: Is there any way we can do this? Are there any suggestions for how to address this?

I can see his point here, and I appreciate this section more than the previous. The craftiness of this approach is twofold. Firstly, by participating in creating a task, people don't need to be ordered to do it; they already have a stake in it. Secondly, almost everybody I have known who has made a habit of giving orders has not had a clue what they are talking about. I worked at an office supply store once where we got frequent orders from the corporate office, and we always ignored them. These orders were made by teams of managers who had never worked the jobs they were overseeing, and so didn't really know what the jobs entailed. Therefore, their orders very rarely solved anything, and very often made my job harder with no reason. There was also no oversight, so it was very easy to ignore the orders.

This is not to say that there was no room for improvement. Had anybody bothered to ask me, I would have had multiple suggestions, all based on my experiences actually doing the job. Nobody bothered to ask me, though.

Carnegie recommends you ask, and good for him for doing so. Somehow this suggestion has never seemed to take root in American businesses, even though many of their owners and managers have read How to Win Friends and Influence People. That's a pity, because I think it is one of Carnegie's better suggestions.

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"TALK ABOUT YOUR OWN MISTAKES," Dale Carnegie recommends, "before criticizing the other person." This is something I already try to do, and I think I do it for two reasons. Firstly, because I generally am guilty of whatever I am criticizing. In fact, I have noticed that the things people are the most critical of are often the things they are most guilty of, although they can be blind to it. So I have tried to be aware of this and fess up to it whenever I can.

I also find it's just a good way of approaching somebody with criticism of them, when I feel I need to, which is increasingly rare. Because then you're not saying "Here is something wrong with you that you need to change," but instead "Here is something a lot of people do, and I am guilty of it myself, and collectively we should try to do better." Then you are not pointing out one person who is singularly and uniquely guilty of some offense, but instead welcoming them into an informal group of people who are all conspiring to improve. It's a much more welcoming way to address criticism.

Carnegie seems to agree. He says: "It isn't nearly so difficult to listen to a recital of your faults if the person criticizing begins by humbly admitting that he, too, is far from impeccable."

I may occasionally be critical of the fact that Carnegie sometimes seems to have a view of humanity as unthinking creatures of neurotic and easily injured egos, but, to his credit, a lot of his book contains chapters like this, that demand understanding and compassion for other people.

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IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PROBLEM FOR ME to remember people's names, and I know I am not unusual in that. I asked on Twitter what techniques people use to remember names, and everybody told me that they're just horrible with it, and they have all sorts of tricks they use to sort of sneak around the fact that they have forgotten somebody's name when they see them. Some are pretty blunt with it, just telling people "I'm bad with names and I have forgotten yours."

Fair enough. But I have been determined to actually learn people's names when I meet them, and learn them instantly, and never forget them. I've been reading up on memory tricks, and there are a few everybody uses, such as imagining the person's name written on their forehead, or coming up with a nickname that will help them remember, or jotting down the name and revisiting it again and again throughout the night, until it sticks.

None of these worked for me.

But Friday I went to a movie. I met three new people that night, and I can tell you all of their names right now. Brianna. Pete. Deborah. Usually I would not be able to remember their names, and probably wouldn't even have tried. But they stuck.

Further, a bartender introduced himself to me. Kevin. And then another bartender helped us at a table, and I overhead his name. Brian. And their manager was on hand, and I heard somebody mention his name in passing. Charlie.

I've got it. I've got a system that works. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's pretty pretty ridiculous.

Here is the trick I use. When I hear somebody's name, I think of someone I know with that same name, and I imagine them hanging off the back off the new person, hands wrapped around their neck, the way I guess I imagine monkeys might ride people around. This doesn't always work. When I heard Brian's name, I couldn't think of a Brian to hang around his neck. However, Brian does sort of sound like Brain, and so I imagined an exposed, pulsating brain with arms hanging around his neck. When I met Brianna, I wasn't sure what to do, so I mentally hung Brian around her neck.

Of course, this trick doesn't work in learning last names, and I shall have to come up with a different trick for that. And I am sure there will be some limitations to this trick that I haven't experienced yet, and I'll have to address them when they comes up. But, for now, I'm just happy for this trick, and that it works. I have honestly been quite embarrassed about the fact that I can't remember names, and am pleased that I will be able to go forward in my life with a little less embarrassment. Although I suppose, when I meet new people, if they have read this, they will know that I am imagining them with another person hanging off their back, monkeylike. If they're lucky, as I could mentally hang just about anything off their back. This fact is also a little embarrassing.

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ALL RIGHT, so you've gone up to somebody and offered them some sincere flattery, in order to get them into the mood to hear some criticism. Now it's time to unload both barrels, yes? We're all adults, we can take it, right?

Of course not. "Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly," Carnegie advises. This can be a tricky proposition, as, without directness, it can be hard to tell exactly who and what is being criticized. I mean, you wouldn't walk around your place of business singing out "Somebody has BEEEEEE OOOOHHHHH!" and expect anybody to know what you are addressing yourself to -- much less the stinky guy in accounting who really needs to buy antiperspirant.

So how to you do this? Well, he gives us a tale from Charles Schwab, again, before the man went bankrupt. In this case, the steel magnate noticed some employees smoking under a "No smoking" sign, went over to them and gave them free cigars, asking them if they wouldn't mind smoking outside.

Crafty, Schwab, although, were I one of those employees, I might think that I had just discovered a mechanism for getting free cigars, and proceed to smoke MORE under the no smoking sign. But, still, the book doesn't address itself to the crazy and the manipulative, as I have mentioned.

Carnegie also warns you not to undermine a genuine compliment by following it up with the word "but," which I think we have all both experienced and done. And he's right. There's no point in starting with a sincere compliment -- such as "Hey, nice dress!" -- when you're just going to ruin it with a criticism -- such as "too bad your ass is so fat!"

Carnegie recommends a subtler approach, which, I assume, might sound something like this: "That's a lovely dress! Such a bold pattern! And those gem appliques are just darling! I wonder if it doesn't feel a bit tight in some areas? I can recommend a tailor who can fix that for you. Or, um, a gym ..."

It's interesting for me to read this, because I used to use a lot of Carnegie's techniques, which I read about in a variety of books, where they are reprinted as sort of common sense. And yet I have not had good luck with them. I have discovered two things: Firstly, if you're telling somebody something they don't want to hear, they're going to get angry at you know matter how nicely or obliquely you put it; secondly, if you aren't absolutely clear and forthright, people often misunderstand what you're saying. So my approach has been to not criticize at all, unless I absolutely must, and when I do so to do it quickly, forthrightly, and in as neutral a tone as I can muster. And you know something? That approach, when I stick to it (and it can be hard, as I can be as hotheaded as anybody) has tended to work for me about as well as any techniques, and with far fewer misunderstanding.

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NOW WE ENTER the final section of Dale Carnegie's book -- or, at least, what is currently the final section. Older editions had two additional sections, one on writing effective letters, the other on marital happiness, and I will detail those very briefly later.

But, for the modern reader, Carnegie ends his book with a section called "Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment." This may initially seem like it is just a variation of the last 12 chapters, which were, after all, about influencing people. But there is a difference. In the last section, Carnegie was mostly addressing his suggestions to situations in which you're dealing with a boss, or an equal, and you want to convince them of something. These chapters are mostly about dealing with employees and other social inferiors, and how to go about correcting them when they make mistakes. If the previous section can be said to be about sales, in that it is about selling an idea, then this section is about management.

Carnegie's first suggestion is to begin with praise. He's basically creating an open-face "compliment sandwich," which is a popular management techniques that I have never actually seen used in the real world. The theory is that people will be more responsive of criticism if it comes wedged between two compliments, so, let's say I was wearing a hideous necklace of human ears at work, and my boss didn't think that was appropriate. They might come up to me and say "Bunny, I have to say I always enjoy your unusual fashion sensibility; it ads real color to the work environment! However, a garland of grisly war trophies might be a little off-putting to some of our clients, so can I ask you not to wear it? Besides, it distracts from your stylish glasses!"

Carnegie apparently never considered that you can close with a compliment as well as open with one, or perhaps he didn't think it necessary. Instead, he compares the opening compliment to Novocain: "The patient still gets a drilling, but the Novocain is pain-killing.

I have to say, it's a little discouraging that, as a species, we require so many tools to make criticism circumspect and easy to hear. But, then again, most people have spent their entire lives sorting through unwelcome, unhelpful, and sometimes completely idiotic advice that they never requested, so maybe we have a right to be a little defensive about the subject.

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AT LAST, the end of Carnegie's "How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking" section, and he ends with something he recommends "when all else fails": Throw down a challenge. He quotes Charles M. Schwab as saying the following: The way to get things done is to stimulate competition.

The example Carnegie gives is a relatively benign one, in which Schwab draws a chalk number on a mill floor, and the day staff and night staff compete with each other to best it. That being said, there is a difference between a challenge, which Carnegie suggests, and a competition, which Schwab recommends, and I have trouble with the fact that the two are conflated. You can challenge yourself, or your employees, without competing against others, and ill-conceived competitions can be disastrous.

There might be a suitable example in history to demonstrate my point. Oh, here's one: Charles M. Schwab. The steel magnate was an inveterate gambler and spendthrift, and he had managed to get rid of his entire fortune by the time the stock market crashed in 1929, to the tune of $500-$800 million dollars, adjusted for inflation. When he died, after living out his last years in a small apartment, all of his assets had been seized, and he owed $300 million. He was a big gambler, and it paid off early in his career, when he made a risky investment in producing the H-Beam, which had no established market for it but went on to become the building block of the age of the skyscraper. But gambling is a dangerous competition -- sooner or later, your competitor will roll the dice right, and you won't.

This is not to say that I think challenges are superior to competition, or that there is no place for competition. I guess I have just noticed that Carnegie doesn't really seem to investigate the biographies of the people he quotes, to make sure their suggestions worked out.

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"DRAMATIZE YOUR IDEAS," Dale Carnegie tells us, and it's sort of a logical fallacy, in that there is a fallacy called "misleading vividness." Now, Carnegie is not advocating that, precisely; it's the sort of thing where you jump to an particularly vivid conclusion about something, even if that outcome is unlikely, and try to use the vividness of your description as the tool of persuasion. So an example might be if I told somebody I was thinking about getting a tattoo of a peanut, and he responded by saying that he knew a guy who got a tattoo of a peanut on his forearm, and then, one day, bang, at the circus, an elephant ate his arm.

This isn't likely to happen, but it might cause me to think twice about getting that tattoo.

Carnegie wants you to be similarly theatrical. "Merely stating a truth isn't enough," he declares. "The truth has to be made interesting, vivid, dramatic." He's asking you to add a little razzmatazz to your pitch, to goose it up a little, the way advertisers have been doing for ages. Of course, ads are just a form of propaganda, in that it is propaganda that is designed to sell you something. And so once again we see Carnegie advising his readers to use propagandistic approaches to try to influence people. It's no real wonder Carnegie has long been a favorite of salespeople. Although Carnegie includes the word "truth" in his injunction, as in "the truth has to be made interesting," truth is a nebulous enough concept that all crappy salespeople are willing to stretch it in order to make a sale, often by telling themselves that they are in service of a larger truth that makes the little details unimportant.

We'll discuss more about Carnegie's distrust of people as creatures of logic, and his willingness to rely on techniques borrowed from advertising and propaganda, when I get to the end of the book. But I wanted to note it again.

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LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT IVAN.

Ivan is a Russian. He was born at a very bad time -- he was just old enough to go to World War I, and returned just in time for the Russian Revolution. He lived through Stalin and World War II, surviving by writing bawdy poems and drinking, and drinking, and drinking. Ivan's past haunts him in the form of a human-sized dummy, who Ivan has with him always, and who says things only Ivan can hear about the worst things Ivan has experienced and done. And today, at the moment of his death, Ivan is going to live it all again -- backwards.

Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe is the third play I have done with the Off-Leash Area, and the first I have done that will be presented in an actual theater, rather than a garage owned by the company and converted into a small performance venue. It is, I think, the most ambitious play we have worked on, telling an epic and heartbreaking tale that stretches across 30 of the worst years of the 20th century, in a place where some of the most terrible things happened, and Ivan is witness to it all.

The play will be the Off-Leash Area's signature mix of text and physical theater -- I have authored the text, but they conceived of the story and gave it its form. I have been involved with the production since the beginning, and have watched it develop, and am quite excited about the resulting play, which is, in turns, funny, terrifying, and terribly sad. I hope you will be able to join me for it.

Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe plays Thurs through Sun, June 4-20 at Open Eye Figure Theater, 506 East 24th Street, Minneapolis. All shows at 8 p.m. Call 612.724.7372 for tickets and reservation.

THIS SUGGESTION is a pretty funny one. It sounds pretty high-minded, to hear Dale Carnegie phrase it: Appeal to the nobler motives. What a great way to motivate people! Steer then in a course of ethical action! Suggest a right course of behavior! Look for the moral way!

No, that's not what Carnegie means at all. I quote:

J. Pierpont Morgan has observed, in one of his two analytical interludes, that a person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one.

In no uncertain language, Carnegie tells you to come up with pretty sounding reasons. why? Because the self-serving person you are talking to is going to want them in order to put an ethical face on whatever you are scheming to do together.

This is another suggestion that I think is effective, but sketchy. After all, all sorts of horrible things have been done under the banner of morality. Carnegie also gives some advice on how to use morality to bully somebody into something they don't want to do: He gives an example of a tenant who wants to back out on his lease, and the landlord essentially tells him, well, I'll let you do it if you will admit to being a liar. The tenant end up staying for the length of his lease.

Nice one, Dale.

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THERE IS A LOT that can be written about the phenomenon of smiling, and so this will probably be just one of several posts I do about it. But this one will be about my smile.

I've decided that a smile should be my default facial expression. Right now, I keep it at sort of a pensive neutral, which I think looks sultry until I see it in a mirror, and then find it boring. Nobody ever compliments me on my sultry pout; instead, the sort of steer clear. However, people are pretty friendly when I smile. Go figure.

Dale Carnegie thought highly enough of the power of the smile to dedicate an entire chapter in How to Win Friends and Influence People to the subject. And so I have been trying to smile more. All the time, actually.

It's not easy when you're not used to it. First of all, it feels odd, even when you're actually smiling and not simply faking it (there is value to faking it, mind you, which I will detail in a later post). I used to find myself smiling all the time, because I had thought of or read something funny, and then looked away in embarrassment. I don't know why. I guess I thought people would find it odd that I was just grinning like that, for no reason at all. But, then, I have noticed that when I see other people smiling, I don't question it. I just figure they are smiley. So it's time for me to get over that. So what if I have a secret joke?

But when you don't smile all the time, you sort of have to encourage yourself to do so. I read up on it, and found this helpful Ask MetaFilter thread, which included this sage bit of advice:

I think I have a great smile, but wasn't using it enough with members of the opposite sex. Now I have a silly little phrase that I find juvenile and funny, I say it to myself, and it automatically, every time, generates a nice smile and I can aim it at whomever I please.

I don't have such a phrase, but I do have something that makes me just beam, every single time. It is this photo:



To explain what you are seeing there, it is my girlfriend Coco on our first trip to New Orleans, before we moved there. We can't see a statue without posing alongside it, and, in this instance, it is a statue near the New Orleans zoo. Coco decided to go over and pretend to be kicking it.

Coco doesn't know how to kick.

She will kick outward, but then spin her body so her leg twists around , producing what you see in this image, more or less. She looks like she's dancing a cartoon version of an Irish jig. And so, when she tried to kick the statue, this is what appeared on film: Coco doing a Sailor's Hornpipe next to a bronze fisherman for no reason at all. And it just cracks me up. So, every time I realize I am forgetting to smile, I think of this image. I have been laughing at it for five years now. I'm not going to stop any time soon.

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I HAVE A PROBLEM. Dieting has stopped be amusing for me. Worse still, my appetite has come back. Impressively, it was down for five months, but now I find myself frequently hungry. As a result, my weight has bounced up a little bit -- it's back up to about 180, which is on the cusp of being overweight. This means that, were I to stop my diet just now, I'd find myself on the wrong side of my BMI pretty quickly.

I'm ending the cookie and shake diet. It seemed to have been pretty effective at stabilizing my weight, but wasn't hugely useful at causing me to lose weight. Some of this, no doubt, is because I wasn't paying as close attention to my caloric intake as I did at the start. Some of it is because I have been eating out more, and it is very hard to determine how many calories you are taking in. Some of it is because I have been drinking, as I am a fan of whiskey, but that will halt weight loss pretty quickly. But the biggest cause of all is that I have grown bored, and that is what I need to address.

I get in kicks every so often where I decide to do something and realize my body shape is not appropriate for that goal. I started this project, for instance, when I was composing the songs for This Is Hollywood, and envisioned myself as a rail thin rock star -- thus the source of the name. That was a pretty powerful image -- it stripped 24 pounds off me. But that project is more than a half year behind me and there is nothing I am now doing that has me reexamining my body shape. And, the truth is, there won't be until the end of the month, because this is an unusually busy month for me.

I'm not very good at self-inspiration, either. I'm mostly motivated by a strange sort of jealousy -- something akin to an unendurable envy, in which I see somebody doing something I think is very interesting or impressive, and I turn green, and I very badly want to be able to do what they are doing. Maybe it is petty, but it's a wildly effective motivator. I am not, at the moment, especially envious of anybody. I'm busy and happy, and so I go out with friends, and I drink whiskey, and I work on my little projects, and I drink more whiskey, and my weight loss plateaus. I also need to address this. Jealousy is a useful muse, but it can't always be relied on.

I'll think about this over the course of the week. I need to inspire in myself a frantic desire to be something that requires less weight. A superhero, for instance, or a hunger artist, or a comic book yogi, or something else that sounds awesome and amusing. Once I have a fixed idea of what I want to be, and that thing needs to be thinner, then I will be able to select a diet that will likewise be amusing, because I will have incentive to. Maybe I should get back to trying to be a rock star. Maybe a new project, like the This Is Hollywood one, will spring into my mind. Whatever the case, I need to make it a priority.

I suspect this is a very odd way to go about making life decisions. But, then, the point of these projects is not to judge how I do things, but instead to figure out how to do them effectively.

More Rock Star Skinny.

I KNOW I AM MOVING THROUGH these chapters fairly quickly, and perhaps I shouldn't. As I have been starting to realize, Carnegie is far more about winning friends than he is about influencing people. And, honestly, I think he's onto something. I am far more likely to be open to contrary ideas from people I know and trust, particularly when I know they understand and respect my viewpoint, even if they disagree with it.

And I think this is one of the uses of charm, and how it can be abused. When people are truly charmed, they are sometimes willing to do things they might be a little more cautious about otherwise. Cosign on a phone plan. Share a bank account. Kill themselves in a bizarre mass suicide. It can be an abusive thing, in the way that lovers will sometimes try to manipulate each other by saying "you would if you loved me." It's interesting that these abuses are never mentioned in Carnegie. I think he may have believed that if you actually followed his advice, you wouldn't misbehave. After all, his advice in this chapter is as follows:

Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.

If you really do that, it's going to be hard for you to take money off someone for a phony investment, because you will sympathize with the fact that they don't want to be robbed by a charming con man.

But here is where we bump up against the limitations of the book. Because it has a pretty straightforward form, and that form is as follows: Carnegie presents one of his rules as a surefire trick, quotes some famously clever people who advocated such an approach, and then gives a few examples of how it can work. So, in this chapter, he tells you that sympathizing is, essentially, a get out of jail free card. I'm not exaggerating, by the way. Here is his opening sentence:

Wouldn't you like to have a magic phrase that would stop arguments, create good will, and make the other person listen attentively?

And what is that phrase? To paraphrase slightly: "I don't blame you; if I were you, I would feel the same way."

Carnegie follows this by telling a very slight tale of an old biddy that took him to task for getting a fact wrong on the radio. He called her and sympathized, admitting, not only that he was wrong (which he has advised doing in previous chapters), but also that he understood why she would be so upset, and was right to be. He follows this up with a tale about President Taft, who was very sympathetic to another old biddy who wanted her son to get a position in government. Se we have two tales that appeal to authority -- Canregie's and Tafts, although I don't think Carnegie meant to suggest he was quite the authority Taft was.

Then we get several tales from the everyday experience, including a tale of an elevator repairman. This fellow had to shut down the elevators of a posh hotel. This bothered the owner until the repair guy explained it was a choice of a few hours now or a longer shutdown later; quick patches were liable to break and do more damage.

In many ways, this is similar to the preceding chapter, in which Carnegie framed discussions according to others' needs; now he frames it according to others' desire for sympathy. So the elevator guy doesn't just say, well, I could patch it but it will bust even worse later. He says, in essence, I understand that this is a big pain, and I know it's a hassle, but I really don't want you to experience a bigger hassle later.

Again, this is a little like Alinsky's admonition to start with people's self-interests, but, in this instance, it is coupled with an appeal to emotion. And now, at last, we now really are entering the realm of persuasion, because we're about to see Carnegie recommend classical logical fallacies, such as this one. He also makes extensive use of appealing to flattery and, to an extent, misleading vividness (we'll get to that in a few chapters.) These are bad tools for logic, but, then, we've seen throughout the book that Carnegie doesn't really trust people as logical creatures, but instead finds them to be petty and ego-driven neurotics who are given to rejecting a logical argument because it displeases them. And so Carnegie turns to flattery and appealing fallacies instead, and he's right, they work. But they are also easy to abuse. Were it not for the fact that Carnegie is so determined to make his readers genuinely listen to and understand other people, chapters like this could be an instruction manual for building a demagogue. And, because I have been focused on how Carnegie approaches friendliness, and not focused on how he approaches persuasion, I have missed this until just now. I thought everything in the preceding chapters was just buttering up before getting to the real argument, but now I realize that for Carnegie the buttering up is a big part of making the argument.

This sort of thing can be dangerous. I think Carnegie was an ethical man, and was really interested in creating a system in which people would give each other eager attention and respect. But remove those chapters and the book offers tools that are the techniques of propagandists.

This is a bit off topic, as this project is called "Bunny Charm School" and not "Bunny Program of Ethical Dialectic." But Carnegie's techniques can be abused, and that's probably worth discussing more; Carnegie never mentions it. There is a thin line between being a charmer and being a sociopath, and it is only a sense of ethical behavior that keeps us from crossing that line.

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IF YOU'VE GOTTEN TO THIS POINT in the book, you might be starting to suspect that Carnegie doesn't really want you to influence anybody at all. I mean, sure, his last suggestion, about making somebody think your idea was his, might seem like a debate trick. Then, by the end of the chapter, it became obvious that Carnegie was really just giving your debate opponent the opportunity to draw a different, and equally valid, conclusion from the same facts. Damn you, Dale!

Get used to it. Carnegie is not going to teach you how to beat someone at argument. It should have been plain when he wrote an entire chapter on the futility of arguing, but here, 171 pages into the book, it is impossible to believe otherwise. Because this chapter is about trying to understand what the other guy is thinking. Really trying. He quotes Dr. Jesse S. Nirenberg (whose name, unfortunately, is misspelled "Gerald S. Nirenberg" in the book), who says:

Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person's ideas and feelings as important as your own.

In some ways, this puts Carnegie closer to being a classical rhetorician than a persuader. While the orators of antiquity weren't precisely concerned with one-on-one dialogue, they were concerned with rhetoric as a mechanism for uncovering truth, rather than winning arguments. Now, the way Carnegie frames it in this book, understanding others' point of view is essential to persuasion. And so it is, but there is the very real possibility that you may be the one who is persuaded.

That being said, his technique is very close to the one recommended in Reveille for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, a community organizer who insisted that change must begin with addressing people's self-interest. According to Alinsky, people are far more likely to agree with something if they understand how it benefits them, and so this is where you should start. As with Carnegie, his recommendation requires that you understand the other person. It's good advice, even if it means, once in a while, that you discover that you are the one who is wrong.

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HERE IT IS, at last, seven chapters into the "How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking," and we finally have a suggestion for how to win people to your way of thinking. And it's pretty sneaky.

Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.

This is another example of Carnegie advice that is rife for potential abuse, and, apparently, this is exactly the way the Bush White House worked. But Carnegie doesn't mean it as a trick, and I'm not sure he phrased it properly.

He's not suggesting that you cleverly insert ideas into somebody's ear through some sort of mesmeric process and then applaud their genius when they say what you want to. His suggestion is much more fair: Lay out the facts and let the other person draw the conclusion. That presupposes a reasonableness that I haven't really experienced, but, then, Carnegie has spent six chapters massaging someone's ego, offering them leading suggestions, listening to their complaints, and avoiding arguments. I have never tried this. Perhaps, when you do, the moment you make a clear case, the other person agreeably nods his head and produces the answer you want.

In my world, you shout at each other, call each other names, question the other person's grasp of history and logic, and then scatter around some facts with the contemptuous suggestion that the conclusion is obvious. And then the other person reaches a different conclusion, and you think him an idiot for it.

Hm. I'm starting to see why that technique might not work very well.

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THIS CHAPTER WILL SURPRISE NOBODY, as Dale Carnegie is all about letting the other person talk, but, in this instance, he is applying the advice to addressing someone who has a complaint. "Let the other person do a great deal of the talking" he advises, and his logic is pretty straightforward: "They know more about their business and problems than you do."

It's a pretty simple point, but well taken, especially by me, as I tend to be an interrupter, and must stop it. Especially when I disagree, I want to jump in and correct every little misstatements I hear, like those annoying plaintiffs on Judge Judy who constantly have to snort and retort to their opponent, saying "That's a lie," or "That's not true, your honor." Well, Judge Judy doesn't want to hear it, and neither does anybody else.

When somebody has a complaint, they are going to make a lot of little misstatements, and most of them don't matter. What matters is that they feel they were wronged, and you can't just argue them out of that. I know from experience that if you just let somebody talk, it will do a lot to allow them to blow off their anger. Sometimes, by the time they are done, they will actually have talked themselves into a more moderate position, or reversed their viewpoint altogether. I've done it myself.

But also, by listening to them, you get a broader sense of what they are complaining about, rather than focusing in on whatever little errors they may be making. So sometimes you might come around to their way of thinking. And Carnegie is pretty explicit that this is not undesirable, as he's not in the "influence people" game to teach you to win every fight; sometimes, it's a good thing if you are the person who is influenced. By the end of the chapter, Carnegie is extolling us to let our friends excel us, seeming to have forgotten his point altogether -- suddenly, the chapter is no longer about addressing complaints, but instead about encouraging your friends to brag about themselves and refraining from bragging about yourself. And, whammo, we're out of the world of influencing people and back in the world of winning friends, and, again, the point is well taken. I am an inveterate braggart, and it is not my best feature. I don't know how Carnegie managed to bring it up in an unrelated chapter, but he did, and now I have to address it. Thanks, Dale; like I don't have enough to work on.

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I SORT OF SIMPLIFIED Carnegie's chapter summary in my headline for space considerations. His actual suggestion is as follows:

Get the other person saying "yes, yes" immediately.

That's right. This is the fifth chapter in the book on winning people over to your way of thinking, and we're still in the buildup. Essentially, Carnegie suggests you begin the discussion with stuff someone already agrees with before leading them into the stuff they may disagree with.

This is a pretty clever tactic, which Carnegie admits he borrowed from the Socratic method. There's actually a proper word for it, elenchus, although, in Socrates' hands, it functioned as a sort of cross examination, wherein the philosopher would ask a series of questions that would elicit agreeable responses, but would lead the person being questioned to an unexpected conclusion. I remember being quite impressed by this when I read it as a boy, but I don't know that I have ever attempted it. It seemed fiendishly clever to me, but, then, in "Euthyphro," when Socrates quizzes the eponymous character on the subject of piety, it is all rooted in a discussion of the desires of the gods, which seemed like a nonsensical approach to the subject. Addmittedly, Socrates' gentle needling is pretty effective in demonstrating that Euthyphro doesn't really know what he's talking about, but, at the end, Euthyphro just gets annoyed and runs off, causing Socrates, who is facing his own impiety charges, to cry out in despair.

So that's the benefit of a classical education: I know enough about Socrates to know that the Socratic Method causes people to make shallow excuses, flee the room, and leave you annoyed. Carnegie doesn't seem to think so, but, then, for him the Socratic method is just part of the buttering up process. And, the truth is, we have 12 chapters in this section, and most of them involve buttering up. There are only three suggestions in the entire section that are directly about presenting people with ideas that might be contrary to what others believe -- so 75 percent of the section on winning people over to your way of thinking is focused on winning them, with only 25 percent dedicated to then actually getting them to agree with you.

This is quite different from how I do things. I tend to present my viewpoints plainly and forcefully, and I figure people can agree with them or disagree, but they will know where I stand.

I suspect Carnegie's approach works better, even if it seems awfully circumspect.

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I'M NOW AT A POINT where I can close the trainer gripper, oh, maybe seven or eight times with my right hand and four or five times with my left hand. That's an incremental improvement from last week, but, then, it's a massive improvement from a few weeks ago, when I couldn't close it at all, and closing it has gotten noticeably easier -- the first few times, it clicks when I close it, when, previously, it was a real effort to get it to touch gently.

I can't close the number one. Not at all. Not even close. And it is making me angry. I am determined to get the thing closed in the next month, but that may not be very likely. This is always the way it is, especially with anything physicial: I get into something because it seems amusing, and months later, after constant work, I am barely competent at even the most introductory level. Here, see for yourself: Here is me trying to squeeze the number one gripper.



Yeah, it's going to be a while before I am popping spinach cans open with my bare hands. However, there is no longer a closed container of spaghetti sauce or pickles that is a match for me, so that's something.

WE'RE NOW HALFWAY through Dale Carnegie's book, and, up until now, there have been a lot of recommendations for how to win friends, but very little about how to influence people. And this chapter isn't going to give you any pointers either, but it does tell you that we're finally getting there, because Carnegie tells us how to butter somebody up before trying to convince them of anything.

His advice is typically simple: Begin in a friendly way. It will surprise nobody that he quotes Lincoln, as he always quotes Lincoln. "If you would win a man to your cause," Lincoln advises, "first convince him that you are his sincere friend."

The truth is, we've now reached the part of the book that I am less interested in, as I bought Carnegie to read his advice on winning friends, not influencing people, so I will be going through these chapters rather quickly. I won't skip them completely, though; Carnegie tends to treat winning friends and influencing people as related and mutually complementary activities, as demonstrated by this chapter: To influence someone, you start by befriending them, using the tools Carnegie has already provided.

This is one of the things that seem like common sense, but Carnegie wrote a chapter on how nice it is to smile, so he isn't going to just assume you know that when you're going to try to influence somebody, it might be a good idea to be friendly with them first. And, based on my experiences with online forums, he's right to be wary of how people disagree, as it's depressingly common for people to go at each other with rhetorical guns ablazing, as though this were the Wild West of debate. I've been guilty of it myself, and I can't say it's ever helped me convince anybody of anything.

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WHILE DALE CARNEGIE recommends against pointing out when others are wrong, he expects a higher standard from you, his reader. Not only are you to confess to being wrong, but, as his summary of this chapter demands, "If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically."

Speaking as someone with a little bit of background in journalism, I am familiar with this as an ethical stance. When the New York Times discovered one of their reporters, Jayson Blair, had a history of plagiarism and fabrication, they did their own internal investigation, which they then published. This was a rather extreme mea culpa from the Grey Lady, but, then, it was a rather extreme case, as Blair had significant ethical breaches in at least half of the 73 national news stories he had written; astonishingly, this included the writer filing reports from places he had never even been.

But the ethics governing a newspaper, which relies on a reputation for accuracy in reporting, are different than the ethics governing human behavior, where being wrong is something you can get away with when you're wrong about something that isn't very important. I have a friend, like most of us do, who is something of a know it all, and given to making grand pronouncements about the quality of a restaurant's food, or the direction the market is going, or what is going to happen in politics, and he is almost always wrong. But so what? It doesn't hurt anybody, and, the truth is, I'm probably wrong about things all the time too, and so I can't be too critical.

So what's the point? Well, some of the chapter focuses on work: Carnegie points out that at work, it is important to own to your mistakes, because then they can be addressed. But otherwise he just seems to think that owning up to mistakes is just good social lubricant. We make little errors all the time -- we show up late for things, or misstate facts, or call people by the wrong name -- and these errors are minor annoyances, but they are annoyances nonetheless. At least by owning up to them, we tell others that we're cognizant of the error, and that it can be annoying.

His chapter actually has a number of stories of people being instantly forgiven of fairly large gaffes when they admit to their mistakes. I think there is some risk here, in that it is not enough simply to admit to making a mistake -- you must also be willing to make a change, if your mistake represented a chronic problem. I've known people who used apologies as get-out-of-jail-free cards, that sort of gives them permission to be chronically late, or to leave their work incomplete, or other recurring problems. This gets to be doubly annoying after a while, because asking for forgiveness is asking a favor, and the implied payback is that you will try not to repeat that mistake. When the Times published their expose on Blair, they didn't simply send him back to work. Not only did Blair resign, but so did his editors; additionally, the paper revamped its editing system to make it difficult for something like this to happen in the future. It was an important step to reestablishing readers' trust in the paper.

So I would amend Carnegie's chapter to include "earnestly attempt never to repeat the mistake," which he does not mention. Otherwise, I think this suggested social lubricant might prove ineffective over time, and may, in fact, become a rather annoying behavior itself.

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I'M GOING TO TAKE a moment out of the regular Bunny Charm School programming to do a little one-off comment, which I will do now and again, when the mood strikes me.

Lately, I have been thinking about people I have known who are not charming, and, in some instances, are not even likable, but get treated as though they are. It's occurred to me that there are some cheats out there that act as a substitute for genuine charm, and cause people to respond exactly as though these people were irresistibly charming, when they might, in fact, be wretched examples of humanity. In fact, I suspect that people who have been able to rely on these substitutions for a fairly long time are going to gravitate toward wretchedness, because they have never had to learn charm.

Heck, in my life, I've experienced a little of this myself -- there was a brief period when my play Minstrel Show was laudably reviewed by the New Yorker when I suddenly became irresistible to a young woman who had previously regarded me as something of a pest. I didn't pursue it, but it was because I wasn't hugely fond of her; had it been a young woman I had a crush on, I might well have taken advantage of my sudden status as a minor local celebrity to make a romantic move.

And these may, in fact, be effective substitutions. I would like to believe that people who are attracted to shallow things are shallow people, and folks who are really worth a damn are going to look past superficial attraction for something more meaningful. But the truth is, I just don't know this to be the case. I have seen perfectly wonderful people go ga-ga over total nincompoops who didn't have a scrap of decency in them. I've found myself gravitating toward people for no good reason but for their fame, or that I found them to be pretty, or that I thought they were in a position to help me out. I've never felt very good about this fact, but that makes it no less true. And I expect it is because each one of these things are, in their way, more obvious than charm, which, after all, only reveals itself through behavior. Most of these substitution, such as beauty, are instantly evident.

1. FAME: I'm going to put this at the top of my list, perhaps because this is what I have responded most to, and feel most silly about. I have found myself laughing too loud at jokes that were mediocre, merely because the teller was famous. I tell stories about celebrities all the time, and take a strange pleasure in knowing details from their biographies. I try to mitigate this by focusing on celebrities whose work I actually respect, and telling myself that it is the work, rather than the fame, that attracts me. But, honestly, if I could spend a day with Zsa Zsa Gabor, I would, and it is not because I was enthralled by her work on Love Boat.

2. MONEY: Ostentatious displays of wealth are magnetic, mostly because people really want to have money, and hope that by being near someone who has money, they might get money; at least, that's my assumption. Maybe they want gifts. Or just want to ride in the passenger seat of a convertible Corvette. We're a pretty greedy culture in general, with entire branches of entertainment based around watching money move around, such as game shows. You can become famous just for having a lot of money, whereas the opposite isn't always true -- very famous people can be surprisingly poor, because fame itself is not immediately marketable, but rather can act as a promotional device for something else. I would be very surprised if Monica Lewinsky has made much money as a result of her notoriety, although I do recall that she tried to start a handbag company. I don't know how well that did, but I would be very surprised if more than a handful of people bought the handbags specifically because it was made by her.

3. GREAT PHYSICAL BEAUTY: I have heard models complain that men are intimidated by them, but, in general, if you are pretty, you're going to get more things in life than if you are unpretty. I have found that beautiful people rarely have great senses of humor and often have terrifically bad personalities. They have just never needed to develop those qualities, because their beauty does the work that a sense of humor and a good personality does for the homely. I, of course, am an exception; I have never let my enormous personal attractiveness be my defining characteristic, nor have I let it go to my head.

4. POWER: Henry Kissinger once said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and I believe him, as there is precious little else about the man that is appealing. I have known people who responded to even the slightest amount of power as though it were irresistible, including a young woman I worked with at an office supply store who slept with almost every assistant manager the store had, just because they were her bosses and that made her weak in the knees. I once had a brief series of romantic encounters with a young woman whose interest in me was probably limited to the fact that I could fire her, as she seemed to hold me in contempt in a lot of other ways. I won't be doing that again, should I ever have anything resembling power again in the future, but I understand its appeal. The whole thing was sort of tawdry and felt wrong, and so, of course, it was dynamite.

5. SEXUAL AVAILABILITY: This is very different from beauty -- there are quite a few people I find beautiful but have no romantic interest in, and I am sure I am not alone in that. But there is something very appealing to being aware that you might be able to sleep with someone, and I suspect a lot of relationship are based in people mutually appreciating the fact that they can see each other naked, and nothing else. I think a lot of people use this as an easy substitute for charm, as this is the most democratic of all the charm substitutions, as just about anybody can act a little slutty every now and then. The truth is, I think this one is a legitimate element of charm when used well, and think that flirting is a classic technique of real charm. But this also works on its own, and so can be used as a complete substitution for -- rather than an element of -- developing a really appealing personality.

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THIS IS LESS a new suggestion than an expansion on the previous chapters admonition against getting into arguments. Not only will fighting with somebody cost you, in the long run, even if you're right, but even telling them that they are wrong is a bad idea. Interestingly, while the focus of the last chapter seemed almost mercenary, in that Carnegie argued mostly that bickering won't get you what you want, this chapter comes from a more generous impulse: Show respect for other people's opinions.

Carnegie returns to Ben Franklin in this chapter, telling that the printer and statesman was so argumentative in his youth that a Quaker friend had to take him aside and bawl him out for being disagreeable. Franklin was stung enough by the criticism to make a dramatic change in his life, swearing off "all direct contradiction to the sentiment of others." This isn't to say that Franklin stopped disagreeing with others. Instead, he learned to couch his disagreements in agreeable language, conceding that there was no doubt some truth in disagreeable sentiments, but offering up his opinion that it may not apply in this circumstance.

Part of Carnegie's point is that you never know when you're going to fall on the wrong side of an argument, no matter how clever you may be or how carefully considered your opinion might be, so it is best to approach these things with the understanding that you may be wrong. He doesn't go into too much detail on this, but emphasizes it enough to make his point. But Carnegie is always utilitarian in his discussion of behavior, and it is his opinion that it is better to obliquely contradict someone else than to do so directly. He recommends leading another person to the conclusion you desire, and letting them think they came up with the idea themselves, which, in a chapter rooted in a firmly stated respect for other people, seems unexpectedly cynical, but perhaps it merely seems that way because this was the exact approach that we are told George W. Bush's staff did to get former President Bush to do what they wanted, and that didn't turn out especially well.

Nonetheless, Carengie's advice in this chapter is well-advised. When I hear something I know to be wrong, I am very quick to jump out and correct it, often very curtly. But I can think of a few recent instances when I was just plain wrong in my correction, and I would have been better off saying "I am not sure about this, but I think such and such," because otherwise I sound like a know-it-all, which is never appreciated, and, worse, when I am wrong, I just sound like a blowhard. A little diplomacy here would not only go a long way toward being respectful of others, it wouldn't do me any harm when I want to not look like a fool.

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"THE ONLY WAY to get the best of an argument is to avoid it," Carnegie tells us, which is an interesting start to a section called "How to Win People to Your Way of thinking," is rather unexpected in a book that promises to tell us how to influence people, and completely surprising from a man whose background was in competitive debate.

But Carnegie is not out to squelch dissent. Instead, he is wrestling with a very old question: How to disagree without being disagreeable. Later, Carnegie will discuss ways to correct mistakes and offer up competing opinions, but, for the moment, he wants to get people to stop being argumentative. He sees forceful disagreement as being counterproductive, and quotes Ben Franklin, who said "If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent's goodwill."
This is the chapter in which Carnegie's view of humanity seems closest to cynicism. He really thinks people generally respond very poorly to having their opinions challenged, and also thinks that making a clear, albeit, blunt case for something will be rejected, no matter how well made, out of the hubris of the listener. He's also pretty suspicious of the opinions of his readers, pointing out that there is a very good chance that what they think is true is instead false, and so we should enter arguments with a degree of humility. These are not the words of a debater.

They are, however, the words of a diplomat. Carnegie was, according to his biography, a very good debater; he was undeniably an excellent and popular public speaker. I get the feeling that he's won enough debates to satisfy whatever part of our ego needs to be satisfied when we get into an argument. He described himself as being quite a scrapper when he was younger. But, at some time before he wrote this book, he mellowed. Disagreements of opinion were no longer a battlefield, and destroying an opponents argument was no longer a noble goal. Carnegie does not want to teach you debate techniques; he wants to teach you how to effectively communicate your ideas, and the make sure your audience is receptive to those ideas.

And so he tells us to steer clear of arguments. I'm fine with that. I've had a few relationships in my life where we squabbled a lot, and voices were raised, and points were forcefully made, and all I ever got out of it was a headache and a nagging sense of guilt, even when I was sure I was right. Nothing was ever resolved, and the same few arguments sprang up again and again. I hated it and still do. And I was quite an online squabbler for a while, especially when I felt I was arguing with somebody who was foolish or disingenuous. Now, I just don't have the energy. I sincerely doubt I have convinced anybody on any Web forum of anything, except that I can sometimes be funny and sometimes be a bit of a jerk.

I do not see discussion as a competitive sport, and, the truth is, I don't really mind what other people think about the world, no matter how foolish I find them, unless their beliefs adversely affect me or others in some way. I am sure there are some things I believe that are equally foolish. For instance, I believe that art painted by celebrity monkeys is about as good as art gets, and I would not appreciate being disabused of that notion. And so, even when people say things I find patently foolish, such as that they prefer vodka to gin martinis or that they prefer to call french fries "freedom fries," perhaps it would just be fair of me to keep my big mouth shut.

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THIS IS AN INTERESTING CHAPTER of Dale Carnegie's book, because it seems to be the one that is most nakedly about flattery. In fact, he begins by telling us a tale I have mentioned in which the author decides to compliment a strange man on his magnificent head of hair. Of course, Carnegie offers his usual warning -- "do it sincerely" -- but otherwise the chapter is all about the power of pumping someone else up.

It should be noted that I have been working with a revised edition, in which the editors went through and updated Carnegie's dated language and esoteric references (this edition, for instance, tells a story from Stevie Wonder's life). But it leaves in the story of Hall Caine, who, even when Carnegie was writing in the 1930s, had already slipped into obscurity, despite having been the most popular novelist of his time. In fact, it is this very obscurity that allowed Carnegie to subtly misrepresent Halls' life. In Carnegie's retelling, Hall was the ignorant son of a blacksmith whose fortunes rose when he wrote am adoring letter to the poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Impressed, Rosetti invited Caine to be his assistant, and from there Caine's literary fortunes rose.
To be fair to Carnegie, every word of this is true. But it constructs a narrative of Caine's life in which he is flung to success as the result of authoring a single letter, and it very much sounds as though he was, I don't know, working the streets as a bootblack, or whatever the hell poor children did in the Victorian era.

In fact, by the time Caine met Rosetti, he was already a man of letters. He had worked as a theater critic for many years and was quite well-known as a lecturer (and, as Carnegie himself had made his reputation as a lecturer, it's surprising he left this out.) Caine has already made a number of friends in the literary world, including Bram Stoker, who dedicated Dracula to him. In fact, Caine only worked with Rosetti for two years, and, although he published a monograph of his experiences with the man. Caine began writing fiction three years after Rosetti died, and there is scant evidence his relationship with the man influence his fiction writing or his later success, and yet Carnegie makes that the entire story.

Oh well. So Carnegie wasn't a particularly good biographer. Nonetheless, if his point is that flattery will get you anywhere, especially when offered honestly, he's right -- and he's especially right that it works best when it makes the other person feel important. Had Carnegie cast his net a little wider, there was another man from the Victorian era who he might have mentioned whose story really does reflect the point Carnegie is making, and who is still well-known today, unlike Hall Caine.

That man was Oscar Wilde. Wilde was born with certain advantages that Hall didn't have, including a mother who was a very well-regarded Irish writer and a father who was so well-known for his contribution to medicine that he was knighted. But Wilde was very much a self-made man, and, often, a very unpopular one. But he seemed as wiling to seek notoriety as fame, and he actively sought out people who interested him, to a great extent by becoming an inveterate letter writer. If someone delighted him, he would write them a letter, sometimes rhyming, and this would often garner him an invitation to meet them. As a result, despite the fact that he was often despised for peculiar aestheticism, which was exaggerated and gaudy, he was nonetheless very much a part of London society, and his wit was legendary. It's possible to read more than a thousand pages of Wilde's letter nowadays, thanks to a book published in 2000, and there are not simply documents of Wilde's famously epigrammatic sense of humor, but also his real respect and affection for his friends.

It is likely Carnegie didn't have access to Wilde's letters, but, even if he did, I'm not sure that Carnegie would have preferred them to the story of Hall Caine. Although Carnegie discusses presidents with some frequency, he tends to prefer ones with homely background, and he prefers his famous people to have the common touch, which Wilde decidedly didn't. Carnegie is not pitching his book at the aspiring Oscar Wilde, but instead people who probably don't share Wilde's genius or his affectations. It's excellent salesmanship of Carnegie's part, as he pitched his guide at the everyday audience, and wanted them to believe that, with the tools he offers, anybody could potentially write an honest letter of approbation, or say a few heartfelt words of praise, and get a good response. He closes his chapter with a rather sweet story of an employer, discovering he was about to lose an employee, realizing he had not provided her with the earnest appreciation she deserved for doing her job well, and took her in front of the rest of his staff to declare her enormous importance to the company. She retracted her resignation. So Carengie's suggestions might not necessarily cause us to become another Oscar Wilde, or get us employment with a poet, but it does seem likely to simply make us more decent, appreciative people.

And with that, we end the section titled "Six Ways to Make People Like You. I'll recap them:

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3. Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Talk in terms of the other person's interests.
6. Make the other person feel important -- and do it sincerely.


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TODAY BUNNY IS 21, give or take 20 years. I'm throwing a party, and you're welcome to attend, if you like.

I suspect I am supposed to be looking backward just now, and thinking about this past year, but it was a good one, for the most part, and I am not in the mood for retrospection. It's been five months since the new year, and I am in the middle of things I began then, and so now is probably a time for looking forward, rather than backward.

I will say that I am very much looking forward to seeing friends tomorrow -- old ones and new ones. I am rather privileged to have the friends I have got, some I have know for several decades, which means they have put up with me through the peculiar wildness of my youth. Many of my oldest friends are scattered across the country; hopefully they will read this and know I am thinking of them today, even if I can't be with them.

I have also been lucky enough to make some very good new friends in the past few years, and the Internet has allowed me to grow my social network considerably -- I have people with whom I feel very close but who I have never met, and almost everybody I know from the past half-decade I initially met online, and still maintain frequent and happy contact with via Twitter or Facebook or Gchat or whatever. The best thing about the Web is that it has freed us, to a certain extent, from the tyranny of proximity -- we no longer live in a world in which we base our social group on who we shared classes with in college, and marry the girl with whom we shared our locker, unless, of course, we want to do that. Who knows. Sometimes coincidence puts great people right in front of you. But sometimes you have to look around a little bit to find people who share your sense of humor, or are annoyed by the same things, or watch the same movies, or have the same outrageous goals. It has gotten a lot easier to find people like that, and so, at this new year in my life, I have never felt that I have more or better friends. So there really is no need to look backward just now, when I have so much to look forward to, including a party tomorrow.

THERE ARE TWO interesting stories that Dale Carnegie tells in this chapter. The first is of a young man who found himself seated at a party next to an adult. They proceeded to talk at length about boats, a subject that greatly interested the boy. When the evening was over, he mentioned the discussion to his grandmother, who informed him that the man didn't care about boats at all. "He made himself agreeable," she explained.

Carnegie also mentions Teddy Roosevelt, who apparently would spend the night before a party cramming. He knew the subjects his guests were interested in, and read up on them. "The royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most," Carnegie advises.
This is all in keeping with Carnegie's general philosophy, which always put the other person at the center of attention and subtly flatters them, but it also reinforces what I have been thinking about. Carnegie's stories here are not about some vagrant who approaches a stranger in a darkened alley and says, "So, I hear you are a fan of Keats." It's about a gentleman and a President. Both are people who, in the circumstances described, did not need to lavish their guests with attention. A gentleman is not obligated to spend hours talking to a boy, and a U.S. President can talk exclusively about himself and nonetheless thrill an audience.

This is the aspect of charm that has been interesting me, and I have mentioned it already: We are flattered most when given attention by someone who doesn't need to give it to us.

I suspect, in many cases, Carnegie's suggestions will work even if you aren't a President. Sociopaths are generally notoriously charming, and they seem to have mastered the art of effective and subtle flattery, which works even when they have nothing to offer but murderous attentions. But, then, sociopaths often also seemed to have mastered the art of seeming to be witty and fascinating, so, once again we have a situation in which someone who could endlessly talk about themselves suddenly turns approving attention on you, and that makes it all the more flattering.

I think of a story I heard Gene Wilder tell on television. He got an unexpected lift from Cary Grant's limo one day, and Grant had just seen Silver Streak and asked if it was inspired by North by Northwest. Wilder admitted that it was. "I knew it!" Grant declared. "It never fails! You take an ordinary guy like you and me, put them on a train with a pretty girl and an adventure, and you have adventure!"

Wilder was astounded that Grant, who has, for many years, been considered the epitome of charm and masculine good looks, would not only consider himself an ordinary guy, but on a level with the nebbishy Gene Wilder. And it was an extraordinary statement, because, despite the fact that it sounded self-depreciating, it actually had the effect of elevating Wilder to Cary Grant's status, or, at least, allowing them to meet somewhere in the middle, where everyday guys ride trains. Grant had a lot of things going for him: He was devilish, and handsome, and famous, and well-dressed, and funny. All these things could have made him utterly insufferable. I suspect it was comments like the one he made to Wilder that, instead, made him famously charming.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

I am in the process of transferring to a new and more magazine-like template, so please excuse the mess for a few days as I get everything nailed down.

ACTUALLY, "Be a Good Listener" is only half of Dale Carnegie's suggestion here. The other half is "Encourage Others to Talk About Themselves." Carnegie quotes a man named Bob Woodford, who said "few humans are proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention."

As with Carnegie's use of a Henry Ford quote earlier, he may have been repurposing this quote. Woodford was a deeply cynical author of pulp novels who counted the caustically funny H.L. Mencken among his friends, and Woodford is most famous for having authored a book called Trial and Error, which was a how-to book about writing that refused to encourage brilliance in prose and instead explained how to succeed in a crassly commercial market. Here is his summary of the typical plot of a pulp novel: "Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl." The quote Carnegie uses is from Woodford's book Strangers in Love, and his novels tended to feature cynical manipulators. I suppose Carnegie may as well have used another quote from Woodford which basically says the same thing, except that the quote reveals the grotesque scheming behind Woodford's characters: "I found out what the dame most wanted, and either gave it to her or pretended I was going to give it to her, and that in all cases got action—always does, always will, for any man."
Whatever the case, the fact that Carnegie cherrypicked this quote and stripped it of its likely context makes it no less true. People are flattered by attention, and, ultimately, Carnegie's primary point is "shut up and let other people talk." Actually, it's more than that. He want you to actively encourage other people to talk. He makes the case that the key to being a good conversationalist is knowing how to get somebody else to open up.

More than that, he thinks it is necessary in business. Most of his examples in the chapter are from businessmen who had a problem with their clients and sat down with them to ask them how they would resolve the problem. In every case, listening with rapt attention produced a satisfactory result when simply dictating to the customer didn't.

I've mentioned this in passing before, but I'll make my comment here more explicit: The undiscussed element in all of this is you. It is probably a mark of Carnegie's charitable sense of the worth of others that he thinks, no matter who you are, if you can develop an ability to really pay attention to someone else, they will be won over by you. Perhaps this is true, although I have a longtime friend who is quite good at listening to me, and who I am nonetheless quite annoyed with all the time, because he has other behavior quirks that are quite hard to stomach. But, then, nowhere in his book does Carnegie says that any single one of his suggestions will work on their own, but neither does he say "You can be a perfectly wonderful listener and if you are otherwise disagreeable it still won't win you any friends."

It's an element of charm that I want to explore further, but can't when I am addressing Carnegie, because he never touches on it. I believe that his suggestions work best, and are most flattering, when they are enacted by someone who is, in some way, desirable enough that they wouldn't need to be quite so winning. There are a few things that will automatically make someone fascinating to a large number of people -- great beauty or wealth are probably the top two. But there are other elements of how we present ourselves that anybody can develop, and these will be some of my later charm school projects: Excellence in dress, elocution, etc. Because I think charm relies on this equation: We are most flattered when fascinating people are fascinated by us.

Dale Carnegie won't tell you how to become a fascinating person, so I'll get back to that. He will tell you how to be fascinated, though, and his suggestions have, in my opinion, consistently been good. This one, for instance, is one I would do well to really work on. I have a terrible habit of dominating a conversation, or, at least, I think I often do. I can be a terrible interrupter, and can just go on and on when I am talking about something that interests me. I will try and participate in a conversation by throwing out little factoids, and, since I have very broad-ranging interests, I have little, half-remembered factoids about just about everything. But being an intellectual dilettante is not the same thing as contributing to a conversation. I have tried to get out of what is sometimes called the "male answer syndrome," which is the habit many men (and a few women) have a voicing an opinion about something, or taking stabs at guessing at answers, even when you know nothing at all about the topic at hand. I used to be terrible about that, and now I try to say "I don't know" when I don't know.

Now, I think Carnegie's suggestion here runs the risk of going haywire when misapplied. First of all, it is possible to simply turn into a Joe Friday-type character, peppering whoever you talk to with staccato queries, which is not conversation but interrogation. Secondly, conversation is a two-way street, and no matter how good you are at asking questions, and no matter how much somebody else might enjoy talking about themselves, you are not conducting an interview and it is your job to bring something to the table. Others are also sometimes aware that, given the chance, they will take over a conversation, and also know it's not very good behavior, and feel a little silly or guilty about it. I have had conversations where the person I spoke to was very good at turning any question back on me, and keep me talking, and it got to feel like I was being interviewed, rather than conversing, and I don't think that's the ideal way to communicate. But, then, it's better than simply hogging a conversation, and Carnegie is probably right to put it as he does. His intention is not to make people into perfect social partners, after all, but simply to give people a few fundamental, functional tools for having better and more democratic interactions. This will certainly do that.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

AS I HAVE SAID, you need different glasses for different purposes. This owlish black pair might be appropriate with a tuxedo or a tweed suit, and would probably look best with a bowler derby or straw boater, both of which I own. They're distinctly intellectual and old-fangled, and so would be best used in situations that call for such a look, such as reciting poetry, or pole-sitting, or haunting antiquarian bookstores looking for tomes of forbidden knowledge. The glasses also might go well with a fez.

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I HAVE NOW LIVED IN ELLIOT PARK FOR FOUR AND A HALF YEARS.

It's pretty unusual for me to stay in one place for more than a few years. I have spent my entire adult life bouncing around from one place to another. Even when I wasn't swapping out states, I tended to move from apartment to apartment fairly frequently. I mapped out a succession of places I lived between 1994-95, and, in 12 months, I managed to live in six different apartments.

But I seem to have settled, at least for a while, in the Elliot P. I have a nice apartment in an old brownstone on the southeastern corner of downtown Minneapolis, and it suits me well. It also intrigues me, as the neighborhood is one of the last vestiges of Victorian Minneapolis, and was once a pretty tony neighborhood. It is now what is sometimes vaguely called "transitional" -- there was a time in the Eighties when it was seen as being quite a bad neighborhood, but now it is quietly working class. A lot of the residents are east African immigrants. Some are students at the North Central Bible College. There have been some new, relatively upscale developments on the western end of Elliot Park and, as a result, I live a block from Al Franken.
Elliot Park isn't very big -- on its eastern end, it's only four blocks, and it's only about eight blocks from east to west, so the whole neighborhood is, at most, 49 square blocks. Amazingly, looking at the map, there is a sliver of Elliot Park across highway 55 and 35W, including a park called Currie Park and the lightrail line, but it also means that part of the Bedlam Theatre is in Elliot Park. I never knew that until just this moment, and I think they would be surprised to hear it, as they seem to consider themselves very much a part of the Cedar Riverside neighborhood.

I don't seem to be going anywhere any time soon, and am not looking to, so I figure it might be nice to take some time to really investigate my neighborhood. There is a lot of history here, and Minnesotans have been unusually good about preserving their history, so there are a lot of resources for me to do this. Just through doing a little bit of digging, I have already discovered that at least two of the three Andrews Sisters were born in Elliot Park, one of them right across the street from me. I am curious about what else I will find.

DALE CARNEGIE'S summation of his advice from this chapter is as follows: Remember that a person's name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language. Carnegie forcefully makes the case that remembering somebody's name, and using it when addressing them, is one of the distinguishing factors between social success and failure.

This is a problem for me. I can't remember people's names. I always ask, and repeat the name to myself quietly. Then, the next time I see the person -- sometimes moments later -- I have already forgotten the name. I don't use people's named when I address them, mostly out of a terror that I might have gotten their name wrong, and there are few things more insulting that calling people by the wrong name.
Carnegie doesn't really give suggestions for how to remember people's names. Actually, in general, his book is light on suggesting techniques for how to apply his suggestions, perhaps in order to encourage people to take his classes.

But no matter. Carnegie's recommendations have so fully entered into conventional wisdom that it's easy to find suggestions for how to do this -- so much so that these techniques were satirized on The Office a few months ago, when branch manager Michael Scott demonstrated his techniques for remembering names: "Baldy, your head is bald, it is hairless, it is shiny, it is reflective like a mirror, M, your name is Mark."

"It works," he says; I have to find a trick that works, because not remembering names? It's rude. I used to simply assume that I was just bad at names and, therefore, my inability to remember them was forgivable. It's not, and I am not merely bad a names, I just haven't made it enough of a priority to become good at it. My memory isn't what it used to be -- there was a time when I could see a film and remember every single line of dialogue from it, and could accurately quote conversations I had months or years earlier. Verbatim. That skill has slipped somewhat. But my memory is still good, and I just need to train it to retain people's names.

I wonder if my difficulty in remembering people's names comes from a weird presumption on my part that I am not especially memorable. I sometimes won't go up to someone I have met a number of times to say hello to them because I am not sure they remember me. I'll just lurk in the background, waiting for some indication that they know who I am, before going up to say hi. This is ridiculous on two counts. First of all, it is very easy for me to go up anyway and just restate my name, in case they have forgotten; secondly, I'm sort of a super-weirdo, and so people tend to remember me, for better or worse. I think this behavior, on my part, can be a little off-putting, as I seem standoffish or snobby. I expect it's pretty common for people who are a little shy to give off the wrong impression like that. I've known a lot of people who others think are a little stuck up, and then you get to know them and just realize that they are a little awkward socially and are just trying to cover it by affecting an air of nonchalance. I imagine I have given off that very vibe many times.

And it doesn't help when you can't remember names. I need to be able to properly work a room -- especially to say hi to people I already know, or it will seem like I am blowing them off, which is terrible behavior. But my occasional shyness is compounded by not knowing people's names, which makes me even more standoffish.

Of all of Dale Carengie's suggestions, this may be the hardest to integrate into my life. It's also the one I most need to integrate into my life. Isn't that the way it always goes?

More from the Bunny Charm School.

YES, DALE CARNEGIE WROTE AN ENTIRE CHAPTER on the importance of smiling. He begins with his usual admonishing that people will spot an insincere smile, and then goes on at length to describe the power of a real smile to create a general good impression. As part of his program, Carnegie would ask his students to smile at someone every hour of the day for a week. Now, I presume he meant this to be a loose directive; at least, I have no plans to wake myself up every hour of the night, stagger out of the apartment at 3am in my underwear, and find somebody to grin at. That sort of behavior will get you arrested.

I have, however, been making it a point to smile at everyone I interact with. I'm a pretty smiley guy anyway, so this hasn't been too hard. This really isn't a very complicated directive from Carnegie, and, unless you have some especially disturbing, Mr. Sardonicus-style rictus, people are generally going to respond better to be smiled at that to being scowled at, or sneered at, or having sharpened teeth bared at.

Last weekend I was at the Minnesota Book Awards, and I saw a young woman greeting people, and she had a great big cheerful grin -- completely unfeigned. And I thought, my God, that girl looks fun, and we must make a point of introducing ourselves before the evening is done. And so we did. The end.

Oh, wait; that wasn't quite the end. There was a point to that story, and it was this: I'd sort of like to be the kind of person people see at parties and think, my god, he looks fun, and I must meet him. So I guess getting into the habit of smiling, darn me, smiling, might do a lot of that work for me.

Point taken, Carnegie. Bunny is going to be a grinning fool from here on out. I often feel like I am trying to suppress a smile anyway, usually because I have thought of an especially stupid joke and I am embarrassed to have amused myself like that. Well, I will hide that smile no more.

More from the Bunny Charm School.

I'VE BEEN WAITING on several pairs of glasses for a month. They got held up somehow; not usually the case, as, generally, online glasses places ship them within two weeks. So my excitement has been palpable and repeatedly defeated, with the daily mail always being a bit of a letdown.

Until yesterday, that is. Yesterday, my first new pair of glasses arrived: gold framed, pink lensed beauties that make me look either like a Hollywood producer or a mafioso from the 1970s. Don't get me wrong, I love the new pair I bought several months ago, and often get compliments on them, but they are too fancy for a lot of my needs. After all, they look less like glasses than the mask Robin might wear in a futuristic version of Batman. A fellow needs several pair, for different purposes. These will the glasses I will wear when I want to look rich and powerful, such as when I need to sign a contract or accept an award. I haven't had either of those things happen for quite a while, and I think I know why: didn't have these glasses.

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