In my earlier post I took a slightly different tack, talking about stuff that really was pretty good but maybe not as astoundingly great as I thought it was (Douglas Hofstadter, William Gibson). That is not quite as embarrassing.
Much of the embarrassment I feel today over this stuff is really kind of joking; the lessons I learn sting a lot more when they're recent, and what's left years later is just the memory of that.
I first noticed this when re-reading and re-re-reading stuff I wrote when I was a kid. There was this pulse-pounding outer-space robot-brain-transplant technothriller called Watch Your Brain (complete text here!) (http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/kibology/watchyourbrain.html) that I wrote when I was about 10 or 11. When I read it at 13 or 14, it was profoundly embarrassing; I couldn't believe I had ever written anything that stupid. When my parents fished it out of the attic and I re-read it at 30, sure, it got some bad laughs, but on the whole it seemed charmingly precocious. Enough water had gone under the bridge that that kid who wrote it was just an early version of me, and I could judge the work as having been written by a boy in grade school.
no subject
Much of the embarrassment I feel today over this stuff is really kind of joking; the lessons I learn sting a lot more when they're recent, and what's left years later is just the memory of that.
I first noticed this when re-reading and re-re-reading stuff I wrote when I was a kid. There was this pulse-pounding outer-space robot-brain-transplant technothriller called Watch Your Brain (complete text here!) (http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/kibology/watchyourbrain.html) that I wrote when I was about 10 or 11. When I read it at 13 or 14, it was profoundly embarrassing; I couldn't believe I had ever written anything that stupid. When my parents fished it out of the attic and I re-read it at 30, sure, it got some bad laughs, but on the whole it seemed charmingly precocious. Enough water had gone under the bridge that that kid who wrote it was just an early version of me, and I could judge the work as having been written by a boy in grade school.