Well, I think that fall has finally arrived in these parts. I know that, according to the calendar, summer was over a month ago . . . but today it just really hit me that we're heading towards the ass-end side of the year. I'd loaded up my bike, got all dressed in my biking clothes, and as I drove to work it dawned on me that I was not going to bike the five miles from my colleague's house to campus in the 30something-degree weather, the gusty wind, and the spitting-down rain. (I could've done it; I had all the right clothes and I wouldn't have gotten excessively cold or wet. But I just - well, I just preferred not to.)

So tonight I rode the exercise bike in the basement while watching the hockey game (yay, Wings!!) and reading my book (more on that in a moment). And dreamed of moving to California . . . There is no point to upper Midwestern weather at this time of year; it's too cold to be outside and be comfortable most of the time, but we don't have any snow yet. Probably it'll be January before the snow flies.

Ah, well. I don't miss being outside during the week, now. And I don't seek the outdoors on the weekends, particularly. So it's a good time of year to think about more sedentary hobbies, like knitting and maybe playing the guitar - and of course, catching up on all the gosh-darned grading . . .

And reading, too. At the moment I'm reading Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama's autobiography. It is an utterly amazing book; I think it's a very accurate, honest look at the state of race relations in the U.S., and the writing is just beautiful, in the literary sense of that term. I'm captivated by it. I signed up to read it because there's a discussion group about the book at work, and I wanted to be in the group. I had no idea about Obama before then. I wasn't too hopeful about the book, even, because I generally don't like autobiographies; generally, I find, people really don't have the perspective on their own lives to be able to stitch out the patterns of events that happen to them (and their interpretations of those events). This book is different. Here are a few snippets to give you the flavor.

On his first winter in Chicago:

Winter came and the city turned monochrome - black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.

On his decision to leave a lucrative Wall Street job to become a community organizer, amid the disbelief of his friends:

I couldn't really blame them for being skeptical. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can construct a certain logic to my decision, show how becoming an organizer was part of that larger narrative, starting with my father and his father before him, my mother and her parents, my memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers and the loss of Lolo to power, on through Ray and Frank, Marcus and Regina; my move to New York; my father's death. I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone -- and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.

And on the relationship of culture to economics:

. . . How could we go about stitching a culture [black, South side of Chicago culture] back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?

Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by the timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens [a Chicago slum], into deeper despair.

And a bit about the relationship of black nationalism to hatred of whites . . . he goes on at length about this, and it's all good, but I can't type it all in . . .

. . . I came to see how the blanket indictment of everything white served a central function in their [black nationalists'] message of uplift; how, psychologically, at least, one depended on the other. For when the nationalist spoke of a reawakening of values as the only solution to black poverty, he was expressing an implicit, if not explicit, criticism to black listeners: that we did not have to live as we did. And while there were those who could take such an unadorned message and use it to hew out a new life for themselves - those with the stolid dispositions that Booker T. Washington had once demanded from his followers - in the ears of many blacks such talk smacked of the explanations that whites had always offered for black poverty: that we continued to suffer from, if not genetic inferiority, then cultural weakness. It was a message that ignored causality or fault, a message outside history, without a script or plot that might insist on progression. For a people already stripped of their history, a people often ill equipped to retrieve that history in any form other than what fluttered across the television screen, the testimony of what we saw every day seemed only to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves.

Nationalism provided that history, an unabmbiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped. A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people's brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.

Well, he goes on in subsequent pages to explain the limits of that stance . . . but you get the point. The man can think. And boy, can he write. If you're looking for some engaging reading, then go get the book . . .