Quim Monzó (Barcelona, ??1952) has gathered in the book Ments preclares, with the subtitle “El llibre dels idiotes” (Books of the Avant-garde) eighty articles that he has published in La Vanguardia over a couple of decades. The common denominator, as the title indicates, is the idiotic behavior, which drives Monzó crazy, as he already did in the stories of Mil cretins or in the articles of Esplendor i glòria of the Internacional Papanates (Quaderns Crema). To combat them, the writer uses his best weapon: the word. And the selection that Julià Guillamon has made is so good that even Monzó, the king of pessimists, has dared to confess that the book has turned out quite well.
What is this book?
Well, it is a book called Ments preclares and it has a subtitle that reads El llibre dels idiotes. This subtitle is two ways of approaching an explanation: one is ironic and the other is what would be literal, the one that does not seek a second level or a first, but instead pleases the editors very much.
How did the idea to do it come about?
I am already too old to make books and it occurred to them to order one from Julià Guillamon. Seeing as I sometimes avoid the irony of saying: damn, this lamp, how well designed it is; and in fact I am saying the opposite: that it is botched, that it is very poorly done, and sometimes a thing is so obviously idiotic that I use the word idiotic.
As a result of the book, idiocy is one of its recurring themes.
Since today you can do a search in the published articles, Guillamon began to look for those that contained the word idiot, idiocy and all the related ones. A lot of articles came out where it went from irony and went directly to insult. It’s funny because, before, you wouldn’t have done the idiotic amount of work to read through all 50 years of articles.
The selection covers more or less the last twenty years.
I guess I was bored of using irony.
That is to say that, when faced with an idiot, you lose the irony.
No no. I always use it, but since you find idiots every five minutes, I suppose there are times when you don’t use it in the article. That’s when you explain. Instead of praise, you write a direct insult.
He really likes Enrique Rubio’s phrase: “The idiots never end”. There was even a moment when he wrote a synonymous phrase in Latin.
Yes, “Stultorum infinitus est numerus.” I already used this phrase before this whole Enrique Rubio reference. I had heard him when I was young, on the radio, and I liked him a lot.
Was he a chronicler of events?
Yes, and it focused on poor scams, like the tocomocho or the stampita, that deceive people. They are such obvious scams that you think how can that person be so short to have fallen for the deception. She explained it very well and always had that phrase about idiots who never finish.
You have made the phrase your own.
It came to my mind during those years of the 2000s, because the sound technician of La competència, from RAC1, Víctor Ollé, who was very good, was also obsessed with that phrase and had it as a wedge. Enrique Rubio had also written a lot of articles, among other places in La Vanguardia.
Is idiocy a subgenre?
There are many writers who have dealt with this topic [and he emphasizes the word theme, which he hates as shown by the title of his book The theme of the theme], such as Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, with a lot of articles where insults towards idiocy were frequent. Or Carlo Maria Cipolla, who developed the theory of stupidity.
He also mentions the Darwin award. What does it consist of?
Now it is already very burned, because the Internet burns everything. But when he appeared, it was fascinating to read in the press that he had been awarded the Darwin Prize, which is given to a person who has died without giving birth, and thus does not convey his stupidity. With Darwin, the species evolves from one generation to the next. But not here, because if an individual does something stupid and dies without having given birth, he does not pass his stupid genes on to future generations.
Criticize social networks.
Because people are very idiotic. There are those who commit a crime and it turns out that there they reveal many things and the police immediately put things together.
And on the other hand, he is very active on Twitter.
According to the days. Now, starting with Kate Middleton, yes, because I have become very fond of this soap opera, I love it. It’s very good! But in general I do use Twitter, you find very good things. Not because it is original, but because you find answers faster than on the radio. You search on Twitter and you have that information long before you do on the radio or digitally. That’s why it’s very useful. But, of course, there are the same number of idiots as in normal life.
He said that in the morning he listens to the radio. A station or is it changing?
I put it on at half past six. And I listen to one station or another if it’s the weekend or if it’s a weekday.
Doesn’t it change the station with the memories?
I don’t have radios with memories, I don’t want them. I have several transistors, each tuned to a station. He’s an idiot, yes he is. But, at the right moment, I turn one off and turn on another. I like them a lot, at home I have three next to the bed.
In these articles, you talk about real idiots, which you have discovered here or there, but sometimes you also identify as an idiot.
Calling myself an idiot doesn’t offend me, because I’ve told myself that all my life. Now, just because I’ve said it my whole life doesn’t mean it’s well said, but yes, I’m an idiot. I don’t find it so serious to call someone an idiot. I am often an idiot, I would have to behave differently and things would go better for me. But in what sense would they be better? I still think they would go better and in the end they would go worse. I’m an idiot.
Idiot in front of another, but if what you do is already good for him…
Yes of course. For example, I remember a time, decades ago, when boomboxes came out. Now it is the mobile phone, the mobile phone has everything. I can’t stand that it has everything: a function or two, and not many more. With the boombox I was outraged. A character from Benzina, now I don’t know if I remember exactly, was deeply against the radio cassette because he wanted the radio to be a radio, but the cassette to be a cassette. Mixing several things has led us to disaster. Everything has to be a thing.
What do you think of the tertullians, who also appear in your book?
I don’t listen to social gatherings. I listen to the radio until the social gatherings start at nine and then I disconnect. It’s going well for me now, because this way I can write, I can work and I can read. The panelists are individuals who know everything. And there are people who know a lot about something. But they are obliged to talk about everything and know everything, have an opinion about everything.
But you have experience.
I once acted as a talk show host, because Màrius Carol asked me to, on a Citytv program in a midday talk show. I was there and I didn’t know what he was doing. My position was almost always, if I didn’t have a formed opinion about what they were talking about, to say: “I have no idea, I don’t know what to say.” I think that character was good, a talker who doesn’t know what to say about things.
The talk show host who doesn’t give his opinion.
It’s just that I don’t have an opinion on many things. I read political articles, but I don’t know if they are right or wrong. I give my opinion on certain things, but feeling obliged to give an opinion is very difficult for me, and sometimes I suffer for them, because it is a job that they have to do as well as they know how.
Beyond the idiots, other constants of his work appear in the book, such as the restaurants, which already appeared in Taula i barra.
I have a hobby because since I was 18 when I left my parents’ house I have had breakfast and eaten almost always, if I am not sick, in restaurants. Therefore, for decades, my life has been in the restaurant and I have seen how they have evolved and how they have increasingly perverted something as simple as cooking well, bringing it to the table and paying. Now it has to become more sophisticated, it has to become a little idiotic.
Have you already assumed that plates are square?
That’s another one: the gregariousness of fashion. I no longer talk about square plates because they have been normalized for decades and now there are new generations who no longer see what I see as strange in a square plate.
Why does everything evolve towards an idiotic side?
The other day I tried to go to a restaurant in the Sant Antoni neighborhood, Doppietta, and making a reservation was an odyssey. I called and no one answered, because you have to book online. It seems like you have to book online, that should stop. They only gave me two options: bar or terrace. I don’t like eating at the bar, because it’s more tiring than eating at a table, or on the terrace, I don’t like eating on the street. But you see the photos of that place and it’s full of tables. Why can’t I eat at a table? Everything is enormously complicated because you can’t talk to a person, because it’s more difficult to do it online. I finally managed to go and I got an extraordinary surprise, because the restaurant is very good, something I didn’t expect from a hipster place in Sant Antoni.
He also talks about language.
If I were born again, something that I would like to study, because in this life I have not studied anything, perhaps it would be language, philology. I like languages ??and I watch how they evolve, towards worse or better.
Catalan version, here