Retrograde Motion
🗓 posted Dec 31, 2025 by Josh Erb🔢 1451 words
🏷 #life #fiction #writing #film #music #review
In high school and college I learned that, in a classroom structure with deadlines and tests, I am quite bad at physics. Or at least that’s what I thought as I suffered through astronomy courses. Looking back I can say with some degree of confidence that what I actually learned was that I cannot learn something if I do not give myself the time and patience to understand it in my own terms. Ideas metabolize differently in every mind.
Despite these pedagogical shortcomings, there's one phenomenon that I’ve carried with me: apparent retrograde motion. Where a body in the night sky appears to be traveling in reverse despite the fact that it's still moving forward. It’s immediately compelling for me because it confirms that our view of celestial bodies is subjective and also demonstrates that this subjectivity plays tricks on us. Things can appear to be moving backward despite the reality that they are moving forward.
Of course all of this is an esoteric wind-up to yet another blog that looks back on the previous year. A common practice among bloggers and social influencers. The collective illusion of going backward despite our constant march into the next year.
Tunes
This was the year that Pile clicked for me. Pile's latest album, Sunshine and Balance Beams, is the closest thing to a perfect album I've heard in a long time. They've mastered the slow build of tension that resolves into epiphany or dissolves into oblivion and they deploy it expertly throughout. They make use of string arrangement flourishes, but not in a way that feels heavy handed or pretentious. The songs are lyrically mature but also opaque enough that I find new images and insights with each listen.
I stumbled into Geese at the end of last year and I love what they're doing. It's very hard to make something that feels familiar and innovative at the same time and I think they've cracked it on both of their latest releases. That being said, it's Cameron Winter's solo album, Heavy Metal, that snuck in at the end of last year and became one of my favorite albums to listen to this past year. It's stripped down and weird and takes you to places you don't expect to go. Highly recommend turning it on and staring out a window while you listen to it.
The Printed Word
I read far more books than I expected to this year, 35 in total.
Some of this reading was part of the research for my second novel manuscript. Most of it was following my own curiosity and seeing where it led. Looking back from the end of the year, most of it was good, but there are three standouts.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà
This books is a hundred things if it's one. A masterclass in the evocative potential of a well deployed simile. An exuberant and surreal exploration of the perspectives available to tell the story of a people and a land. Just sublime.
New Selected Poems by W.S. Graham
My encounter with Graham this year was something like fate. Someone, I can't remember who, posted a Scottish memorial with his line "What is the language using us for?" engraved on it. Two or so weeks later I was in an English bookstore here in Mumbai and stumbled across this collection of his work that included the titular poem. Graham's poetry resonates deeply with me as I have been re-evaluating what compels me to read and write. I read these lines from his poem, The Thermal Stair, and I understood a part of it a bit more:
That words make their world
In the same way as the painter's
Mark surprises him
Into seeing new.
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Any poet who can write a line like "A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck" is worth paying attention to. This epic poem is incredibly well done. Shifting, contradictory symbols. Vivid set pieces and the complex cast of characters that move through them. The steep bill of history that inevitably comes due. Lines from this book still rattle around my brain all these months later.
Light & Sound
One Battle After Another, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
I met up with a group of tech workers in Malcolm X park in D.C. shortly after we had lost our vote for union recognition at Mapbox. Some of the people there were interested in getting their own organizing up and running at a different tech startup. We talked with them about everything we'd been through and the hurdles that would have still laid ahead if we had won our vote. At a certain point, one of the other workers said something to the effect of "It never ends, does it?" So I guess it's not surprising that One Battle After Another would resonate deeply with me. The exuberance of taking action, the unspoken awareness that you are being crushed by an overpowered and intractable structure, the exhaustion, the persistence of hope despite it all. Everything is up there on the screen. Highly recommend this film in all it's zany, inglorious ambivalence.
The Battle of Algiers, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo
I saw OBAA in the theater with a group of friends. We talked about it over drinks, afterward and all discussed the loudly telegraphed influence of The Battle of Algiers. We got together a few weeks later to eat pizza and watch Pontecorvo's classic. I had seen the film before, but really only half watched it while doing other homework in my college library. This was the first time I'd watched it with my full attention. An incredible bit of film history, all the more interesting because of how tangled up it is in the actual history.
Rough Drafts
Another reason for the title of this post is the inescapable feeling that I'm moving backwards instead of forwards with my writing. This past year has been an important one for honing my craft. I've been lucky to have the time and energy to do deep research and writing on any subject of my choosing. I'd like to think I've grown a lot as a writer.
On a personal level, this year has been about coming to terms with why I write fiction and recognizing that this is different from why I want to publish some of my writing for a broader audience. I write fiction because there are questions, feelings, situations I'd like to explore in a style and mode of my own choosing. Sometimes its because I don't currently see any other fiction writers exploring the same things from the angle I find most compelling. Sometimes its because I'd like to see for myself how a well known story might sound in my own voice.
As far as publishing goes, I think the motivation is twofold. First, I'm craving some external justification for dedicating time to my writing. I'm at a point in life where I have an endless list of responsibilities and obligations. A deadline and/or a paycheck (regardless of size) for finalizing a writing project is an effective mental aid for carving out time from these responsibilities. Without it, it can feel quite silly to sit alone in a room and make up stories instead of spending time with my wife and son. The second, more embarrassing motivation, is that I want validation from people outside my immediate social circle. The more acquainted I become with how written words are refined and syndicated for broad consumption, the more I come to realize the truth that any published writer, regardless of bylines or accolades, starts from a fundamental need for other people to tell them their words and stories are valuable and worth the time and attention of others. Without this you write purely for your self and your loved ones.
Despite the apparent lack of forward motion, the work continues. My in-progress manuscript is mostly plotted out. It's much more sprawling and weird than the first one. I'm deep in it and will be happy to dedicate the majority of my energy toward finishing the first draft in between freelance gigs.
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