The Book Of The Manafonistas won’t be written. At least, I won’t play the game. The reason is simple. We couldn’t restore Ian’s texts (more than 125) in their glorious entirety. Only some of them resurfaced from the days of old (fucking 3!). When he put them, temporarily, into the basket, he didn’t want to vaporize, but to free them. Give them a secret place to hide and sleep for possible futures (I assume). Now they extinguished themselves, simply dissolved into the blue nowhere. If no Mana or „fan“ or reader has collected them, a part of unreconstructible magic is gone. The book would have been bilingual, with a bit of Dutch wrapped around it. And I know that 80 till 90 percent of his postings would have made it. I already planned the book, the way of mixing, cutting it all up in slices. Though he may not have seen it that way: Ian is fucking genius, and since I have now my Borussia Dortmund sabbatical (anyone who mentions Borussia Dortmund in my presence, will see me now turn into Steve Martin-mode from „Dead Men don’t wear plaid“, when Stevie hears the word „cleaning woman“), I had a detailed plan for our „scenius work“. In July and August I would have worked through all the texts of Ian and myself, just giving them a new order, and separate the okay texts from those with extra class, then (same procedure) through all the texts of the others who of course would have been asked beforehand, haha. And if they agreed, we would have needed about 25 new texts by the rest of the wild bunch, for reasons of balance. Thus another yes would be required. So, gosh, enough good chances to fail. Everybody would have reworked his or her own contributions before the final cut – of course (thereby doing the post-production). I’m sure there would have been a quite clever way of reassembling the texts, working with Dream-Logic-fuelled chapters (titles) – it all would have been done with recurring phrases, sentences, quotes – undermining linear texts & simple time lines. The fucking angels in the details. The book would have been a great genre-mix of fiction, thought, sex and crime, transcendental nonsense, fucking great music, time travels and travel stories. Jukeboxes and autobiographical snippets included. Let’s call it a day. We’re still here, that’s the good news. 300 dollars (this is serious) for that reader outside the inner circle who copied them all! ALL, not just 75 or so. One lady or gentleman from the inner circle would get the forthcoming edition of THE MAGICAL WORLD OF THE STRANDS, our reissue of August 2015. And ten free copies of the book in spring 2017. Won’t happen. „Nothing in my life is numbered / In my life nothing is planned / You might think you see purpose / When what you’re seeing is a fool / A thin line like from a spider / Upon which I dance / Nothing in these days is constant / Come home to chance“ (The Go-Betweens & me).