Book Progress #25

At this point it is clear that I am not going to finish the whale chapter by the end of the weekend. Had I only the information previously at my disposal, the books and articles cluttering the apartment and my hard drive, I might have succeeded, but a boon of new information has caused me to go back and revise much of what I had written. (One such resource, a translation of Albert Koch's journal of his American travels from 1844-1846, has been especially helpful. Ken Rose's The Beginning of the Age of Mammals arrived yesterday, as well.) A history of science paper might result from what I've been able to find, but for the moment I'll just say that the story of Koch's Hydrarchos, Harlan's Basilosaurus, and Owen's Zeuglodon is much more complex than has been recounted elsewhere.

Even though I will miss my self-imposed goal I have confidence that I will be ready to edit the first "real" version of the whale chapter this week. At present the chapter is a tangle of names, dates, ideas, anatomical terms, and tidbits of natural history. There is a coherent voice among the mess, but it needs to be drawn out and emphasized.

A lack of a good title for my book continues to vex me, as well. Although I am glad I read Adrian Desmond's Archetypes and Ancestors using it as a resource has barred me from co-opting the title for my own ends (I have independently come up with it after reading a passage in S.J. Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory). For a time Ancestors seemed like a fair candidate, but it is too vague and T.H. Huxley's qualifications about linear & intercalary types are now too ingrained in my thought to allow me to use it without reservation. Late one night Wonderful Life came to me mind, as well, but obviously Gould already used it for a superior book and I can't simply pick a synonymous term for "wonderful" (Marvelous? Stupendous? Peachy?) and retain the "life" half for a new title. Even after I refused to appeal to Darwin's closing prose from On the Origin of Species (there can only be so many books with "endless forms" in the title) I found myself entertaining the possibility of The Entangled Bank, but I was not completely happy with it, either. I am not going to bother myself too much about it at the moment (I have more immediate writing concerns), but I do want to carefully consider what my synthesis should be called.

Further, my feelings about the book have taken a strange turn. I am so close to completing at least one chapter (perhaps one of the strongest in the book) but the closer I get to finishing it the more reservations I have. Is what I have written accurate? Will it keep the attention of the reader? What if I have forgotten something? What about all the things I do not have the time or space to address? Will all of this work amount to anything or will it languish on my computer? I have nothing to be nervous about (this is entirely an extracurricular endeavor) but yet I am feeling somewhat anxious, perhaps because the closer I get to unveiling what I have put together the sooner I might be criticized for it. Still, these concerns are not strong enough to be crippling and I still want to reach my goal of finishing 3-4 chapters by the time the fall semester commences.

At present there are 31 pages in the chapter on whales. Here is a Wordle of the work as it now stands;

title="Wordle: Latest Whale Chapter iteration"> src="http://wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/126689/Latest_Whale_Chapter_iteration"
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