The date of this post will read the 26th, but I am actually trying to get day two's thoughts down. Spent nine hours installing a granite patio, followed by a few hours socializing with different groups of friends. Friend Jeffrey Schrader threw a fun party which unfortunately was only turning into a house reading as I was having to leave to go to social function number two. My apologies to all poets present for snaking out (a friend was in town from New York for one night and waiting for me in San Francisco).

The only thing I have to say art-wise, other than "working and trying to do 'my work' is a bitch", is a reflection on the granite patio which bears strange relation to yesterday's piece. The patio was built by random coursing, whcih is a general schema, or really the lack of a schema, for determing what pattern the joints between different-sized stones go in a patio (or a wall, for that matter). The two joint patterns we are probably all familiar with, square corners as in most tile or linoleum, or staggered joints as in brick, where the bottom brick ends in the middle of the one above it (i.e. the joints are displaced one-half a brick length apart from course to course) are both regular. Random coursing is a way to use up stone of a differnt size by fitting them all together in a puzzle whose whole assemblage was never determined beforehand.

To do this, you operate with two basic rules: no joint can run longer than x (where x is a number specified by the mason- usually a proportion of the size of the area being covered) and no offset can be less than y. Thus, if two stones have one dimension of the same length, they can only be set side by side if their total length isn't greater than x, and the joint created by the next course of stone up against them must be broken by a stone which does not share that dimension, but crosses that joint and ends at least distance y from it. Sorry if this is hard to visualize, I'll investigate adding pictures tomorow.

Here's the thought. Square corners, where all joints line together indefinitely, are very weak constructions, because all the joints are allowed to fail simultaneously (this is especially important in walls building). In a brick pattern, the vertical joints are taken care of, by being staggerd, but the horizontal is ignored and allowed to run indefinitely. Random coursing is a process of interjecting the vertical axis into the horizontal, and vice-versa. This is also the strongest method of building, as not one joint's failure can undermine the entire structure.

Again, somewhere in the use of vertical and horizontal here, an analogy is wanting.