H.L. Mencken & my weblogs
Archive: Culture Low and High
After a fashion it was H.L. Mencken who inspired me to begin keeping a weblog. Back in the old American Mercury he ran snippets from American newspapers, mostly from small towns that were exemplary in capturing the naivet?, ignorance and foolishness of the average citizen of the USA.
Mencken Chrestomathy
My original weblog grew from my personal website. I was always adding new pages, Blogger, and then Live Journal and finally Movable Type made it easier to keep adding and adding.
I wanted to keep entries that were just bits of quote and citation of the silly doings of the faithful elsewhere so I created the weblog now called Gullibility isn?t in the Dictionary. Wanting to keep God separate from sex (as many Christians say he prefers) I created Amorous Propensities. And the rest followed.
While the personal entries are typical diary entries the scraps of quotation and pointers were inspired by Mencken?s Americana. It would be a year at least before I looked around the web and saw that millions were doing likewise.
Feel free to leave a comment on H.L. Mencken & my weblogs.
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I'm a happily gay atheist. Homophobic, racist comments and conversion attempts are deleted.
Disagreement is fine but hate speech won't be tolerated. Even if you share my prejudices I'd rather you not insult other people who leave comments here.
This is a personal hobby and shouldn't be confused with a more general sort of public forum or chatroom. you'd like to know more about me check about page.
Thanks, Richard
1Posted by: Jack Fritscher on April 29, 2004 02:43 AM
May I offer that in my forthcoming gay pop-culture nonfiction book titled ?Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch?s Mouth,? I have begun Chapter Three ?Sex and Witchcraft? with the following quote from H. L. Mencken: ?Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere is having a good time.?
?Popular Witchcraft? was the first book to touch upon gay witchcraft. The first edition was published in 1972. I have spent the last 15 months re-setting the book?s info and clock for 21st-century practitioners, queer theorists, historians of pop camp, and general readers waiting in airport security lines. The new rewritten edition will be published by a very respectable university press in October 2004.
Please visit my site to see bits and previews. Cheers.