From Logan K. Young’s review of the Byron Coley anthology, which I linked to the other day:

But, of course, [Coley] didn’t start out that way. “This is an example of my writing at its shittiest,” reads the preface to his NY Rocker ‘82 review of the Dü’s Land Speed Record. (Literally, he spends half his word count waxing how the French would shove shrapnel in enemy bungholes to fashion human bombs.) “…none of the lousy grammar or questionable word usages have been altered to cover my ineptitude,” he writes before the longest piece herein… That he’s so willing to share the ecstatic yod of what’s basically his journalistic juvenilia proves just how cocksure he’s become. (I, for one, am still trying to bury the purple prose of my fledgling scribbles; alas, the cub Coley never had to battle Google.)

Chuck Eddy similarly has two pieces in his new anthology — one on Living Colour, another on KRS-One — regarding which he spends part of his preface to that chapter shaking his head at how he framed those particular pieces (I don’t have the book in front of me right now to quote). I find this warts-n-all approach to anthologizing your work fairly intriguing (though maybe it’s nothing new? did Norman Mailer ever go there?).