Paul Soulellis

Weymouths Volume 10—Whence is this mass of shingle derived? 

The title of this volume, in the form of a question, is extracted from the 1884 text Geology of Weymouth, Portland, and coast of Dorsetshire, from Swanage to Bridport-on-the-Sea, with natural history and archeological notes by Robert Damon. I’ve pulled 11 pages of the book to use here—the entire “Chesil Bank” section—speculating on the forces at work behind this rare geological formation.

The second text—59 words placed on top of my photographs at Chesil Beach—is the opening paragraph to John Cowper Powys’s 1934 Weymouth Sands. A single word per page slows it down, illustrates each word (or pair of words), opens up the read.

The sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave. Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth’s ancient antagonist.

Two more Weymouths books are complete. These are both text-based.

Observation

Volume 5 is an excerpt from The New English Canaan by Thomas Morton (b. 1578), first published in 1637. The “First Booke” details Morton’s observations at Wessagusset, the Native American territory that was replaced by Weymouth, “containing the original of the natives, their manners & customs, with their tractable nature and love towards the English.” I adapted the complete text of the first book into more normalized English for enhanced legibility and set it on 164 pages. It’s a 400-year-old first-hand account of the language, dress, food, living conditions and character of the people that the English settlers fought and killed.

Morton describes the Native Americans as noble and superior people, compared to the English, and believed that the New England settlers should take a more integrated, “multi-cultural” approach. The publication of The New English Canaan was considered heresy and Morton was eventually arrested as an agitator and banished to Maine, where he died in 1647.

Burial

Volume 6 is the haunting text of the 1642 deed that details the purchase of 26 acres of land by the English settlers from the Native Americans. It’s signed by the English and four Native Americans. In his 1884 Historical Sketch of the Town of Weymouth, Gilbert Nash introduces the text by saying that the “Indian title to the town was extinguished by purchase.”

Test book just arrived from Edition One Books in Berkeley, CA. This is Weymouths Volume 1—The Interviews.

Cover and sample spreads from Weymouths Volume 12—1,485 Colors.
330 pages of color pixels randomly extracted from photographs taken in March and April 2012 at—

Weymouth, Dorset

• Chesil Beach
• Nothe Parade
• Jordan Hill
• Maiden Street
• River Wey
• King’s Statue

Weymouth, MA

• King’s Cove
• The Canoe Room
• House Rock

The pixels are organized in quartets, as quintets (with the addition of background pixels), as groups of 10 in spreads, in nine chapters of 165 (organized by location), and all 1,485 colors in the full volume.

To wander, to ramble, to roam.

Perched Blocks, Erratic Block Large masses of rock, often as big as a house, which have been transported by glacier-ice, and have been lodged in a prominent position in glacier valleys or have been scattered over hills and plains. An examination of their mineralogical character leads to the identification of their source and, consequently, to the path taken by the transporting ice.—Text-book of Geology. Archibald Geikie Macmillan and Co. London, 1882

Weymouths Volume 9—40 Views of House Rock. 100 pages plus cover.

Weymouths attempts to portray place and identity as endless, multiplex constructions, unlimited by reality or imagination. Every instance—each memory, text, image or encounter that I record in these books—contributes to a constantly connecting (and expanding) view of the past and future.

One place that this plays out—albeit in the language of machines and bots and the crowd at large—is Wikipedia.

“Weymouth can refer to” appears at the top of this Wikipedia page (and at the top of every Wikipedia disambiguation page). At the bottom of these pages: “This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title.” This is where sense is made on the web—where meaning focuses and expands.

It’s how the crowd understands “Weymouth.”

There are Weymouths in New Jersey, Massachusetts, England, Nova Scotia, Tasmania, New Zealand and Barbados. 19294 Weymouth is a main-belt asteroid, discovered in 1996. Tina Weymouth was the bassist for the Talking Heads.

I’ve grabbed all 82 of the images from all 33 articles, and all of the user-supplied metadata associated with each image. This pile of content is gathered into Weymouths Volume 2—Weymouth can refer to.

Here are all 33 Weymouths, according to Wikipedia today.

• Weymouth, Dorset, England
• Weymouth and Melcombe Regis (UK Parliament constituency)
• Weymouth and Portland
• Weymouth Bay
• Weymouth Beach
• Weymouth Harbour, Dorset
• Weymouth Harbour Tramway
• Weymouth Pavilion
• Weymouth railway station
• Weymouth Quay railway station
• Weymouth, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Weymouth, Massachusetts, United States
• Weymouth Township, New Jersey, United States
• Weymouth, Tasmania, Australia
• Weymouth, Auckland, New Zealand
• Weymouth, Saint Michael, Barbados
• Weymouth F.C.
• Weymouth College
• HMS Weymouth, several ships
• 19294 Weymouth
• George Weymouth, English explorer
• George W. Weymouth, American politician
• Katharine Weymouth, publisher of The Washington Post
• Lally Weymouth, American journalist
• Richard Francis Weymouth, English Bible scholar
• Tina Weymouth, bassist for Talking Heads
• Thomas Thynne, 1st Marquess of Bath, 3rd Viscount Weymouth
• Ceawlin Thynn, Viscount Weymouth
• Weymouth bit
• Double bridle or Weymouth bridle
• Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy
• Weymouth Wildcats
• Weymouth Sands, a novel by John Cowper Powys

An incredible find last night. I was looking through the 1844 Geology of Weymouth book and it mentions, in a footnote, the recent discovery of the Roman temple at Jordan Hill in Weymouth, England. I had wandered up to Jordan Hill in March so I followed the “link” (which was simply a reference to “the November proceedings of the Ashmolean Society”) and sure enough, found it on Google Books.

This is such a good one. Will probably become one of the twelve books. It fits in perfectly with the theme of larger structures and the retrieval of less visible histories.

“(A)bove these ashes was a double layer of stone tiles, arranged in pairs, and between each pair was the skeleton of one bird, with one small Roman coin: above the upper tier of tiles was another bed of ashes. Similar beds of ashes, alternating with double tiers of tiles, (each pair of which inclosed the skeleton of one bird, with one copper coin,) were repeated 16 times between the top and bottom of the well: and half way down was a cist containing an iron sword and spear-head, and urns like those in the cist at the bottom of the well. The birds were the raven, crow, buzzard, and starling. There were also bones of a hare.”

A Dr. Buckland suggests “that this building may have been a temple of Esculapius [Asclepius, god of medicine and healing], which received the votive offerings of the Roman families and invalids who visited Weymouth for sea-bathing and for health.” Bones of young bulls were also found nearby.

Spreads, round 2.

These are more final. Getting ready to send a test file to the printer on Monday (300 pages).

The thread that creates Weymouths Volume 1, The Interviews is my conversation with Jack in Weymouth, England, which references and then connects to my conversation with Jim in Weymouth, MA. But at the heart of the book is the flow of the River Wey itself, its formation lovingly detailed in the geology lesson by Jane. Jane’s section is another branch of the interviews — Jack, Jim, Jane and Geoffrey — all touching, mashing, looking at and flowing past one another. The book (and the river) bring them together.

Weymouths, the twelve volumes:

River The Interviews
Light Color Index
Erratic 40 Views of House Rock
Memory The Benches
Image The Postcards
Burial (Preservation) The Canoe Room / An Agreemt Betweene ye Inhabitants off Wamouth concerning there Land sold now to ye Towne off Wamouth, 1642
Strata Geology of Weymouth, Portland and Coast of Dorsetshire, 1884
Disambiguation The Twenty Weymouths of Wikipedia
Sea Loss of the Catherine, 1846
Ship The Coming of the Hull Company, 1923
Moon Moonfleet, J. Meade Falkner 1898
Puritan The Maypole of Merry Mount, Nathaniel Hawthorne 1837

I’m inside the book now, the first volume of Weymouths. These are very preliminary spreads—so preliminary that they’ll probably have changed when we see them next. But I’m excited to post these things in formation, before they become too precious.

These are the interviews. Jack, my guide in Weymouth, England, provides the overarching narrative. My conversation with Jack is the main thread through the book and other voices enter and exit. I’m letting the voices co-mingle. Sometimes they’re near each other, to suggest a kind of relationship. At other time I’m more forcibly mashing them up, encouraging the narrative to shift out of time and place at specific moments, to open up new spaces.