Looking Sideways: 10 Things
Torren returns, a novel of the year, and the unlikely final resting place of a Beat legend.
1. It’s the beginning of November, and I have a late entry for my novel of the year - the beautiful Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan. This elegant, elegiac treatise on the peculiarities of male friendship, and our blokey reluctance to deal with our own mortality, has made me reflect deeply on how I view these topics. (And if that isn’t the job of art, then I don’t know what is).
(Incidentally, I picked this up because subscriber
recommended it to me on my ongoing subscriber chat about books and reading, which you can find here. And, as ever, you can find all of my 2025 reads here).My code LOOKINGSIDEWAYS10 will get you 10% off any order from Finisterre.
2. One remarkable nugget I picked up from Mayflies - the legendary Carolyn Cassady, wife of Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road, lived out her final days on a caravan park near Beaconsfield.
More in this extraordinary and rather lovely story by Phil Hebbelthwaite.
3. Adolf Silva’s horrendous Rampage crash has sparked a) the inevitable medical bill crowdfunder and b) the re-ignition of the debate about the level of financial responsibility brands are morally accountable for in such circumstances.
Earlier this year I shared a recent Tortoise series on this subject; this Pink Bike podcast with Tarek Rasouli is also very worth a listen:
4. New Torren Martyn alert.
5. Empire’s recent brilliant podcast series on the life, work, moral faults and legacy of George Orwell is a welcome reminder, yet again, of how prescient a writer and journalist Orwell really was.
Take his essay ‘The Freedom of the Press’, discussed in the Animal Farm episode of that series, from which the extract above is taken, and which is as relevant now as when it was written back in the 40s.
6. Tickets are selling quickly for my forthcoming KMF interview with Orlando. Who’s coming?
7. A very insightful and welcome perspective on AI from inside the tech industry.
Use my code LOOKINGSIDEWAYSXDB for 15% off anything from Db.
8. Who was occultist and ‘Master of the Dark Arts’ Aleister Crowley? And why has he had such an outsized influence on British rock music, asks Paul Morley in this brilliant BBC radio documentary.
9. Zadie Smith was great on Adam Buxton, especially on being one of the few people still not using social media:
“Prior to 2008 and the invention of these iPhones, the simple reference to the pain of your adversary would not have seemed in any way strange to anyone on the left. That would have been a part of our acknowledgement of a struggle. So it’s not it’s not me who’s changed. Everyone has changed around me.”
10. Luke Una is back with a fortnightly show on Worldwide FM, which is just the tonic I needed to end the week.
Thanks for reading and supporting Looking Sideways! If you have any thoughts about any of the stories I discuss this week, let me know: