About the Kite Runner and discussion questions: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/kite_runner.html
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo – 2005
http://www.preface.calpoly.edu/2005/index.html
Michigan State University “One Book, One Community” – 2005
http://www.onebook.msu.edu/OneBookOneCommunity-MichiganStateUniversity.html
The following using the Kite Runner from this web page: http://homepages.gac.edu/~fister/onebook.html
College of the Redwoods -(2007)
Creighton University - The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan; Surely You're Joking by Richard Feynman; Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (2007); instructors choose one of the four for their section of a first term seminar
Niagara University(2007)
University of North Carolina, Wilmington - The Kite Runner (2007) .pdf on how to use it in the classroom
UNC Wilmington events fall 2007
"There has long been concern about angry reaction in Afghanistan to the screen adaptation of the novel, particularly a pivotal scene in which a boy is raped. In late November, Paramount Pictures, the film studio that released “The Kite Runner,” spirited the film’s four young actors out of Kabul to the United Arab Emirates for their own safety.
Mr. Ahmadi said the novel, by the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, had not been banned. The novel is written in English, which most Afghans cannot read."
We read this in our book group a couple years ago. Now we're considering it as a summer read for our peer educators at Rollins College. Since I read it, the movie has come out... so there's even more buzz than there used to be. I'm going to collect resources about this book and the movie and the author here."THIS powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.
But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ''The Kite Runner,'' are only a part of this story. A more personal plot, arising from Amir's close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear."
Book club book for May 2007. The Arab-Israeli conflict becomes clearer to me, with the identity crises of a husband and wife in Tel Aviv. Images too clearly drawn to read sometimes, of people being blown up and lives being torn apart. This Algerian former police officer now living in France conveys the complexity of identities: Bedouin, Palestinian, across-the-wall Arab, Israeli Arab, Israeli. 
Walking through the narrow alleyways in the old part of Moroccan cities, the medina, what dominates are the high walls around you, except in the marketplaces, with their tiny shops, shallow stalls shelved from floor to ceiling with goods. What is behind the walls? Author and scholar Fatima Mernissi describes her house in Fez, in the 1940’s:
“First, there was the square and rigid courtyard, where symmetry ruled everything. Even the white marble fountain, forever bubbling in the courtyard center, seemed controlled and tamed. (…) Then, facing one another in pairs, across the courtyard, were four huge salons. Each salon had a gigantic gate in the middle, flanked by enormous windows, opening onto the courtyard. In the early morning, and in the winter, the salon gates would be shut tight with cedarwood doors carved with flowers. In the summer, the doors would be opened and drapes of heavy brocade, velvet and lace let down, so breezes could flow in while light and noise were kept away.” (p. 4)
Our group’s entree into old Morocco was in a building like this, which houses the Centre for Cross-Cultural Living (CCCL) in the medina in Rabat. Their three-story building is roofed, unlike Mernissi’s home, so that the weather does not intrude, allowing the participants in its short- and long-term programs to use the “courtyard” space for large-group meetings and meals. The salons in CCCL had become offices and smaller meeting rooms. Narrow staircases in several corners took us to those upper-level rooms, many opening to the balconies on each floor, overlooking the first floor below. It is an architecture we saw repeated in more public buildings in several Moroccan cities and one familiar to visitors of (Al-) Andalusia in Spain, and even in monasteries in the Balkans I had seen.
In our second night in Morocco, when we ate with different families in the medina, Wendy Brandon and I entered our hosts’ house through the courtyard, this one opening up to the stars, and followed the corner stairs up, and up, to a cozy apartment and its long kitchen and eating area. I could see that its dimensions mirrored those of the salons-cum-offices in the CCCL. The next day as our whole group toured the same courtyard, we saw that there was also an adjacent riad, another square-walled structure of gardens. The former Sultan’s house in Rabat was similar, but much more sumptuous of course.
What I didn’t quite understand until revisiting this type of house in Mernissi’s book was that it allowed for an extended family to pool their resources, to live together (a patriarch, his sons and their families) instead of each son’s family going off to live on their own.
And of course, these walled houses could enforce the other aspect of traditional life in Morocco, and perhaps in most Islamic countries: that of keeping the women secluded. Often these women’s only view of the sky would have been from their courtyard, or occasionally from the roof of the building, when they went to hang up the laundry. With walls surrounding the house, and windows opening up only to the courtyard, what happened within the family stayed in the house. Still today, walls keep out those who should not enter, and back then, kept in those (women and girls) who should not leave. And those who stayed inside then had to make much of what they were allowed. Mernissi’s creativity as an adult was no doubt fueled by the stories she heard from her aunts and mother, and by the appreciation the older women showed when the little cousins would perform plays of their own making. As the title of Mernissi’s book implies (Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood), girls and women longed for the freedom to leave these walls, and since she wrote of life under French colonial rule, freedom from those uniformed foreign soldiers who kept watch at various corners of the medina and beyond.
On our study tour, we must have passed by people who still live in these houses, in extended families. Our hostess for that evening meal, on her third floor apartment in her family’s house, worked with the sub-Saharan refugees in Rabat. Her husband is a teacher. She wears a hijab, a scarf, but is not secluded by the standards of sixty years ago or more. Now I wonder what aspects of her life are similar to her mother’s or grandmother’s? How many meals do the various family units share? Is childcare a family enterprise? How much of every nuclear family’s income is pooled for the larger, extended family? And what of those who live in the Ville Nouvelle, in apartment buildings? What aspects of shared life with close relatives do they still enjoy?
I also realized on this trip just how much we learn in layers, that finding a truer meaning is like peeling an onion, that there’s always more to it. So my understanding of the word harem is now more elaborated. Mernissi speaks of her traditional upbringing as in a domestic harem: Extended families, sharing most activities (meals especially), but very often without polygamy. Quite bourgeois, she says. In contrast, what I had understood the word harem to mean was what obsessed the Western imagination for centuries: the imperial harems, of the Ottoman Turks among others, with hundreds of slave girls.
Now I’m contemplating this domestic harem, especially the extended family part. When did we in the U.S. stop living with our parents? Or near them? I grew up with two grandmothers living in my house, and that was already rare in the late 60’s. My children did not, my parents not wanting to impose on their children what had been forced on them. Both sets of grandparents lived 1,000 miles away, until they moved south near the end of their lives. Our long-distance relationship was also a product partly of social class, of educated children following their careers.
We learned that Moroccans have been crossing the Strait of Gibraltar (from the Arabic Jebel Tariq, meaning Mountain of Tariq) for a millennium and a half, first to conquer the Iberian Peninsula and then rule there for 700 years. And for the last fifty years perhaps, to find work in the harvests, since both Morocco and Spain have thriving citrus groves and truck farms. And not only migrant agricultural workers: many of Morocco’s educated elite understand as we do in the U.S., that in a globalized economy, their economic well-being demands that they travel once more across the Strait, to the European Union, or to follow the trail of so many others in these last 500 years, from Europe and the countries bordering the Mediterranean to the now somewhat different “New World” of North America.
IT is a truism of American life that we’re too darn messy, or we think we are, and we feel really bad about it. Our desks and dining room tables are awash with paper; our closets are bursting with clothes and sports equipment and old files; our laundry areas boil; our basements and garages seethe. And so do our partners — or our parents, if we happen to be teenagers.
This is why sales of home-organizing products, like accordion files and labelmakers and plastic tubs, keep going up and up, from $5.9 billion last year to a projected $7.6 billion by 2009, as do the revenues of companies that make closet organizing systems, an industry that is pulling in $3 billion a year, according to Closets magazine.
This is why January is now Get Organized Month, thanks also to the efforts of the National Association of Professional Organizers, whose 4,000 clutter-busting members will be poised, clipboards and trash bags at the ready, to minister to the 10,000 clutter victims the association estimates will be calling for its members’ services just after the new year.
But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.
“It’s chasing an illusion to think that any organization — be it a family unit or a corporation — can be completely rid of disorder on any consistent basis,” said Jerrold Pollak, a neuropsychologist at Seacoast Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, N.H., whose work involves helping people tolerate the inherent disorder in their lives. “And if it could, should it be? Total organization is a futile attempt to deny and control the unpredictability of life. I live in a world of total clutter, advising on cases where you’d think from all the paper it’s the F.B.I. files on the Unabomber,” when, in fact, he said, it’s only “a person with a stiff neck.”
“My wife has threatened divorce over all the piles,” continued Dr. Pollack, who has an office at home, too. “If we had kids the health department would have to be alerted. But what can I do?”
Stop feeling bad, say the mess apologists. There are more urgent things to worry about. Irwin Kula is a rabbi based in Manhattan and author of “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life,” which was published by Hyperion in September. “Order can be profane and life-diminishing,” he said the other day. “It’s a flippant remark, but if you’ve never had a messy kitchen, you’ve probably never had a home-cooked meal. Real life is very messy, but we need to have models about how that messiness works.”
His favorite example? His 15-year-old daughter Talia’s bedroom, a picture of utter disorder — and individuality, he said.
“One day I’m standing in front of the door,” he said, “and it’s out of control and my wife, Dana, is freaking out, and suddenly I see in all the piles the dress she wore to her first dance and an earring she wore to her bat mitzvah. She’s so trusting her journal is wide open on the floor, and there are photo-booth pictures of her friends strewn everywhere. I said, ‘Omigod, her cup overflows!’ And we started to laugh.”
The room was an invitation, he said, to search for a deeper meaning under the scurf.
Last week David H. Freedman, another amiable mess analyst (and science journalist), stood bemused in front of the heathery tweed collapsible storage boxes with clear panels ($29.99) at the Container Store in Natick, Mass., and suggested that the main thing most people’s closets are brimming with is unused organizing equipment. “This is another wonderful trend,” Mr. Freedman said dryly, referring to the clear panels. “We’re going to lose the ability to put clutter away. Inside your storage box, you’d better be organized.”
Mr. Freedman is co-author, with Eric Abrahamson, of “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” out in two weeks from Little, Brown & Company. The book is a meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mess-for-success tips include never making a daily schedule.
As a corollary, the book’s authors examine the high cost of neatness — measured in shame, mostly, and family fights, as well as wasted dollars — and generally have a fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they live or die by. They wonder: Why is it better to pack more activities into one day? By whose standards are procrastinators less effective than their well-scheduled peers? Why should children have to do chores to earn back their possessions if they leave them on the floor, as many professional organizers suggest?
In their book Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson describe the properties of mess in loving terms. Mess has resonance, they write, which means it can vibrate beyond its own confines and connect to the larger world. It was the overall scumminess of Alexander Fleming’s laboratory that led to his discovery of penicillin, from a moldy bloom in a petri dish he had forgotten on his desk.
Mess is robust and adaptable, like Mr. Schwarzenegger’s open calendar, as opposed to brittle, like a parent’s rigid schedule that doesn’t allow for a small child’s wool-gathering or balkiness. Mess is complete, in that it embraces all sorts of random elements. Mess tells a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas neat — well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no personality (as any cover of Real Simple magazine will demonstrate). Mess is also natural, as Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson point out, and a real time-saver. “It takes extra effort to neaten up a system,” they write. “Things don’t generally neaten themselves.”
Indeed, the most valuable dividend of living with mess may be time. Mr. Freedman, who has three children and a hard-working spouse, Laurie Tobey-Freedman, a preschool special-needs coordinator, is studying Mandarin in his precious spare moments. Perusing a four-door stainless steel shoe cabinet ($149) at the Container Store, and imagining gussying up a shoe collection, he shook his head and said, “I don’t get the appeal of this, which may be a huge defect on my part in terms of higher forms of entertainment.”
The success of the Container Store notwithstanding, there is indeed something messy — and not in a good way — about so many organizing options. “When I think about this urge to organize, it reminds me of how it was when Americans began to take more and more control of their weight: they got fatter,” said Marian Salzman, chief marketing officer of J. Walter Thompson and co-author, with Ira Matathia, of “Next Now: Trends for the Future,” which is about to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. “I never gained weight until I went on a diet,” she said, adding that she has a room in which she hides a treadmill and, now, two bags of organizing supplies.
“I got sick of looking at them so I bought plastic tubs and stuffed the bags in the tubs and put the tubs in the room.” Right now, she said, “we are emotionally overloaded, and so what this is about is that we are getting better and better at living superficially.”
“Superficial is the new intimate,” Ms. Salzman said, gaining steam, “and these boxes, these organizing supplies, are the containers for all our superficial selves. ‘I will be a neater mom, a hipper mom, a mom that gets more done.’ Do I sound cynical?”
Nah.
In the semiotics of mess, desks may be the richest texts. Messy-desk research borrows from cognitive ergonomics, a field of study dealing with how a work environment supports productivity. Consider that desks, our work landscapes, are stand-ins for our brains, and so the piles we array on them are “cognitive artifacts,” or data cues, of our thoughts as we work.
To a professional organizer brandishing colored files and stackable trays, cluttered horizontal surfaces are a horror; to cognitive psychologists like Jay Brand, who works in the Ideation Group of Haworth Inc., the huge office furniture company, their peaks and valleys glow with intellectual intent and showcase a mind whirring away: sorting, linking, producing. (By extension, a clean desk can be seen as a dormant area, an indication that no thought or work is being undertaken.)
His studies and others, like a survey conducted last year by Ajilon Professional Staffing, in Saddle Brook, N.J., which linked messy desks to higher salaries (and neat ones to salaries under $35,000), answer Einstein’s oft-quoted remark, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?”
Don Springer, 61, is an information technology project manager and the winner of the Type O-No! contest sponsored by Dymo, the labelmaker manufacturer, in October. The contest offered $5,000 worth of clutter management — for the tools (the boxes, the bins and the systems, as well as a labelmaker) and the services of a professional organizer — to the best example of a “clutter nightmare,” as expressed by contestants in a photograph and a 100-word essay. “Type O-Nos,” reads a definition on the Dymo Web site, are “outlaws on the tidy trail, clutter criminals twice over.”
Mr. Springer, who in a phone interview spoke softly, precisely and with great humor, professed deep shame over the contents of what he calls his oh-by-the-way room, a library/junk room that his wife would like cleaned to make a nursery for a new grandchild. With a full-time job and membership in various clubs and organizations, and a desire to spend his free time seeing a movie with his wife instead of “expending the emotional energy it would take to sort through all the stuff,” Mr. Springer said, he is unable to prune the piles to his wife’s satisfaction. “There are emotional treasures buried in there, and I don’t want to part with them,” he said.
So, why bother?
“Because I love my wife and I want to make her happy,” he said.
According to a small survey that Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson conducted for their book — 160 adults representing a cross section of genders, races and incomes, Mr. Freedman said — of those who had split up with a partner, one in 12 had done so over a struggle involving one partner’s idea of mess. Happy partnerships turn out not necessarily to be those in which products from Staples figure largely. Mr. Freedman and his wife, for example, have been married for over two decades, and live in an offhandedly messy house with a violently messy basement — the latter area, where their three children hang out, decorated (though that’s not quite the right word) in a pre-1990s Tompkins Square Park lean-to style.
The room’s chaos is an example of one of Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson’s mess strategies, which is to create a mess-free DMZ (in this case, the basement stairs) and acknowledge areas of complementary mess. Cherish your mess management strategies, suggested Mr. Freedman, speaking approvingly of the pile builders and the under-the-bed stuffers; of those who let their messes wax and wane — the cyclers, he called them; and those who create satellite messes (in storage units off-site). “Most people don’t realize their own efficiency or effectiveness,” he said with a grin.
It’s also nice to remember, as Mr. Freedman pointed out, that almost anything looks pretty neat if it’s shuffled into a pile.
