worksinprogress

WORK IN PROCESS

This page is the portal to samples of works that have been completed but are not yet published, or recently published, as well as works that are being made available for publication. They are described and links are provided to sample writing and or lists of contents.

BOOKS

THE "BABO" GOSPELS grew out of a lifelong interest and formal learning in religion and belief, and subsequent apostasy. After writing a large nuber of essays on different aspects of religion and belief, all in the atmosphere in which religion had insinuated itself into American politics, I decided that it might be a good idea to cohere them in some fashion for my grandchildren, who are geographically distant from me, though not because I am outspoken on the subject of metaphysics. The preamble to this forthcoming book explains more of what motivated it.

THE ART OF URBANISM is a recently completed 65,000 word manuscript that is accompanied by 220 illustrations of painting throughout history that deal with the City and with the character of Urban Life. It is an academic book of eight chapters that follow both historical and stylistic lines in painting in what is now somewhat uncomfortably called "Western Civilization." A CDrom is available with sample chapters. The book is under review by a publisher.

FORTHCOMING, SPRING 2013, TRANSACTION PRESS. 80,000 words with illustrations of stills and posters from American feature films that chronicle the past century's growth and life in the American city. Drawing upon over 200 feature films from the first days of cinema to the present day, this academic book treats the reciprocity of the American City and the cinematic industry. In fifteen chapters covering topics from immigration and politics to growing up in the city and the city of the future, the American city is shown through the lens of its unique invention--the motion picture.

PUBLISHED (AuthorHouse Books, 2005, Available from AMAZON.COM) book is not intended to be an “academic” treatise, although it may have its uses in academic discourse about cities and urban life. It is a “personal” point of view of urbanism. But much of my personal observations about cities are, owing to my professional background, informed and expressed in terms that are part of academic discourse. While they do not comprise a “theory” about cities, they form a rather consistent and integrated perspective and prospect of urban life. Some are more “academic” in tone, even to the inclusion of notes and references, others are, for lack of a more appropriate term, “impressionistic,” speculative and even fanciful, ranging in their provenance from public radio essays and newspaper op-eds, to academic journal articles and reviews. Overall, this books attempts to demonstrate that the media of the arts and of popular culture are fitting avenues to learning more about the multiple dimensions of urban life, that insights into that life might come from a movie, a poem, or an op-ed polemic.

from Chapter 1

A Gift of the River Dragon

The River Dragon's Daughters

Weiping dribbled the goat's milk carefully onto her left breast. Some ran down her stomach, but some drops clung to her nipple. It was a small breast, and she wondered how it might look if it were indeed engorged with mother's milk. It would be bigger, and firmer, she considered, like Chen Yi-ban's, the size that the village boys seemed to like to measure with their hands.

I haven't even a small handful, she thought. No boy would take any notice of these meager mounds. But that didn't matter now. Perhaps this baby would love her breasts.

She breathed a sigh of relief when the child's mouth actually latched onto her, and then gasped when the power of its suck surprised her.

From such a little mouth, such a little baby. [More]

(The River Dragon's Daughter is partially completed book spanning the lives of four Chinese women from the Republic to the present day)

PUBLISHED, 2007, and available from Amazon.com. Based on nearly 30 years of traveling to some sixty countries, escorting tours, and living in working London, Paris and Hong Kong, the author relates a variety of personal experiences, adventures and misadventures, lessons about travel and fellow travelers, observations about foreign peoples and places, and personal self-discoveries enhanced by being a stranger in strange lands. The contents for this book are arranged around travels with family, escorting American travelers abroad, and traveling and living alone in foreign countries. A sample chapter of an adventure in a Malaysian rain forest is illustrative of one of the forms of travel chronicled in this memoir.

PUBLISHED 2008, Fiction based on an exploration of a movie memory and an exotic city and the movie The World of Suzie Wong. What happened to Suzie Wong in the forty some years since the movie was filmed. This story is set in the reality of the present-day Hong Kong. Available from Amazon.com, or signed copies directly from the author (sebastiangerard@mac.com).

The reunion of Paolo Romano and Frank D'Annunzio forty years after their graduation from Issac Jogues Jesuit high school in Rochester might never have actually happened. But it did, at least in the reverie of Romano, and this narrative recollection of the antics of his friend from the old Italian neighborhood and the their coming of age forms the core of this comic novel of friendship, religious doubt and rebellion, and sexual discovery. It starts with a phone call.