For many years Kostas Mavroudis has delivered a short prose form of surprising density (see “With a return ticket”, “Garibaldi Curtains” and “The String”). There is something hybrid about these prose texts: flash narratives, confessions, travel stories, essays, diaries, all skillfully combine different genres of writing with key references to the arcane aspects of culture: micro-details that shed light on the big picture. His new collection, Bad Ischl Salt, is out by Kihli in a few days, and today we are pre-publishing an indicative excerpt.

“Erotism, sleep (a mocking waste of time) and diet trap duties and burdensome demands.”

I have already spoken about this particular person. From the years of his stay in Hesperia, his relations with the world were determined by restraint and the principles of alien, non-dogmatic, asceticism. He was impressed when he once read that Saint Francis drank water for a whole week and listened to the singing of cicadas, or that Don Quixote assured his squire that “for knights-errant there is no honor for a month, and when they eat, their food must be as humble and rude as they can find.” He began to show misgivings about the body very early on, which erotica, sleep (a ridiculous waste of time) and diet trap hassle and burdensome demands. As a child, he found it amusing to move two jaws open and close within a few hours, but it took years for the childish shyness to become an objection, especially to its continuation, the process of digestion. “In the beginning there was a reason” suffered a humiliating defeat. What started with a supermarket cart and ended on a table was the prelude to a scandal. “Every meal,” he wrote, “is a negligence that ends in pregnancy, which ends in an unnoticed birth. We constantly appeal to the truth, but we see the laws of our physiology as alien, we feel (and are) existentially and aesthetically hostages. Like the heroes of Buñuel (“The Secret Charm of the Bourgeoisie”), who defecate in front of the audience, but eat alone, he considered it indecent to eat in public. “I don’t know if Byron starved himself to maintain his elegance (he ate three slices of toast a day and drank some tea), or if he really hated the feeding process. “A woman should never be seen eating in public” (“A woman should never be seen eating …”), he wrote, probably as a developed perception of someone who, as a child, asked his mother: “Why are you so do you eat a lot?”

Culture is a set of arrangements of our functions. In the theater of Epidaurus – a giant loudspeaker – he was intolerant of the noises of his stomach and reacted accordingly one day when his secretary saw him with nail clippers. As if doing something unreasonable or as if embodying Plotin’s shame for his body, he shouted, lowering his eyes: “… and in spite of all this, we pretend to be creators!” However, there were images of dishes that revealed sides of a moral (or surprisingly elegant) character. One summer on Mount Athos, he watched the monk Athanasius, who ate and studied his father’s texts, removing, of course, inappropriate indulgence. He remembered old acquaintances who showed some reverence for bread, and he was struck by the habit of a friend (1946-2019) who, after a meal, pecked crumbs on the table with his finger and brought them to his mouth. In the memoirs of an Australian soldier, he read that during the Battle of Gallipoli (1916), the enemy trenches were so close that the combatants understood not only what the enemy was preparing, but even what spices (known and unknown) were preparing. used. He often came across – once even fixed – thin images of tables: “In rustic baskets lay bread, like babies in a cradle,” or “Pearls of black caviar floated in a crystal bowl, surrounded by crescents of lemon.” On one page, Joseph Roth was similarly surprised: “the smell of the morning coffee (at the Magerl Café in Vienna) was the second morning.” The episode with the monk Dom Perignon (1638-1715) also belongs to the same category, when in the cellar of the abbey, after completing painstaking experiments in the production of champagne, an angry cry was heard: “Brothers, come quickly, I drink the stars.”