Desperately seeking Sully

Where to start? Well, the obvious answer is 1901, because that's the first year the Nobel Prize was awarded for literature. The winner? Sully Prudhomme, French poet and philosopher.

Believe it or not, it's not all that easy to find. I'm pretty sure his most recognized work, Stances et Poèmes, was never translated, or if it was it hasn't turned up yet. So I tried Amazon, but on my student budget I will not be buying these books unless I find a good deal.

Fortunately, I'm studying at a great French university, the Université de Montréal, and they have a really good library for "les belles lettres," (literally "beautiful letters") so I'm excited. I'm going to go to the literature library tomorrow and see if I can convince one of the crotchety old librarians to assist me. Hopefully they're better than the law librarians, who are pretty much uniformly evil old harpies crouching behind computers, gazing balefully at all who dare ask for help.

I'll report back tomorrow if I make it out of the witches' den alive! Wish me luck.

The Nobel Project

I should probably start by explaining the origin of the title. I am not the Lofty Idealist. The name derives from a criteria for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In almost all of the speeches that explain why someone wins, the phrase "for his lofty idealism" or something along those lines is seen frequently. The Lofty Idealist is, therefore, my name for winners of that prize, and it is my hope to spend some time with them, and get to know how such a diverse group came to be unified by such a common thread, and by diverse I do not mean in the usual way - they are predominantly white Western European males - but in the way they are diverse as thinkers and writers. 

I completely recognize that there are other criteria involved in a Nobel Prize being awarded, which are not always in keeping with a spirit of lofty idealism themselves. I'm fully aware that I could have just as easily launched the Giller Prize Project, or the Booker Project, or indeed the Not-Nobel Prize, since there are probably more fine writers who haven't won than have. in fact, I'm currently reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which would top that list for sure). I chose the Nobel because I could use some lofty idealism in my life, and it seems as good a path as any.