Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton

Photo by Mark Veltman

The New York Times

Hard to believe Ms. Swinton is 51, but I recall seeing her in Orlando back in 1992 shortly after I'd met Sun-Ae, with whom I attended the film, which I believe Sun-Ae chose since I'd not known of it, though I knew of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, on which the film was based and which I've not (yet) read despite intending to for nearly thirty years, ever since a Baylor acquaintance was reading it and relating its weird plot, a wonderful weirdness captured by the captivating Ms. Swinton, whose career I've not followed because neither, she says, has she, having been "making it up" as she goes along, "never [having] set out to be an actor" (or actress), but having "slid into performing" in film upon meeting "the experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman" and forming "an artistic collaboration that only ended with his death in 1994," bringing to a close her first foray into "industrial filmmaking," a consequence as haphazard as "her sideways tilt into an acting career," a phrase by the Times writer Charles Isherwood that turned my mind to my own "sideways tilt" into industrial teaching, immersed in laboring with students on the mechanics of essay composition, a practice that has at least forced me to write with an attention to detail, though perhaps this blog alone would have done that, but speaking of work, I now have work to do and must close this stream-of-conscious thought evoked by Mr. Isherwood's late-December Times portrayal of Ms. Swinton as an "Alien Laborer in the Hollywood Factory" (December 30, 2011).