This somehow doesn't fit into my paper, but it's excellent;

"While Dickens was still writing Oliver Twist, a theatrical pirate made an adaptation of it which Dickens went to see. It was so offensively bad that in the middle of the first scene the young novelist laid himself down on the floor of his box and never rose until the curtain dropped.” (Steven Marcus, “Who is Fagin?”)

Also, my theme song for the night:

Mmm, Sparknotes called to say they're pretty sure Oliver's day wasn't goin' gaga because of Rihanna shaking her bumbum, bro.

oh noes

And let me present to you all:

A Brief Illustrated History of Artificial Fagin Jew-Noses.

Top row: Lon Chaney with his Fagin nose (1922) and in a regular photoshoot. Bottom row: Alec Guinness’s nose as Fagin (1948), in comparison with his actual nose, here shown while in costume for his later role as Obi Wan Kenobi. 

Richard Dreyfuss was also apparently deemed not Jewish enough for this 1997 adaptation: 

I've actually got a few more examples, it's just a pain to post photos. 

The worst thing ever:

Knowing that the exact quote you want exists somewhere within a three foot radius of where you are sitting, but wasting your whole day not finding that paragraph again amid the mountains of text you've cocooned yourself in.

Treachery.

I'm not doing very well at keeping up with this blog.

Well, it's 1 a.m. and I just got lost in my own paragraph and if that isn't a sign that I need a microwave noodle bowl then I don't know what is. So while I eat these I'll bullet point some miscellaneous struggles--we can't have the library books getting all noodley.

-For every 100 pages I've skimmed, I'm using about one sentence.
-I'm pretty sure I just wrote the same sentence three times in a row.
-This section on Sikes is really turning out to be a head-scratcher.
-I'm spending way too much time researching minor details that would only be useful for the second half of one sentence, such as:
-What happened to Bob Fagin after Dickens left the factory? I have no idea.
-Overall I think I'm selling it pretty well, considering I don't believe half of what I'm writing.

Sadly, I think I'm still only in stage 1 of Julia's Stages of Paper Writing. I had a brief moment of stage 3 while the library started with that buzzer, but the noodles are clearing that up.

I think I have this thing more or less framed, I just need to get my head in the game and string these sentences together better.

Why Oliver Twist?

Well, frankly, because it happened to be sitting about two feet in front of my face when I first read the list of novel choices. After choking through Great Expectations in high school and being inflicted with yearly repetitions of A Christmas Carol throughout my life, I'd written my relationship with Dickens off as a lost cause. Still, I didn't even have to lean forward significantly to grab Oliver Twist off the shelf, whereas my family's copies of Middlemarch and Jane Eyre both would've required me to walk across the room. Alas, my cat was snoring on my lap, and, not wanting to dislodge her, I opted to give Dickens another shot. Turns out that was a good call.

Testing....testing....