Page | 19            The Adolescence of Blogs, ‘The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh’, and H. P. Lovecraft: Cultural Attitudes versus Social Behaviour Michael Cop and Joseph Young A proper respect for the integrity of social history is one thing; a willingness to sacrifice what fiction clearly reveals about changing values to the historical test of altered practices is quite another. Cognitive dissonance ensures that cultural attitudes and social behaviour are not always in step, especially at moments of transition. In the early modern period, for example, when romantic love was increasingly seen as the proper basis for courtship on the stage, arranged marriages were still a common social practice. It is perfectly possible that parents could side with Romeo and Juliet at the theatre, while assuming the right to choose their own children’s marriage partners at home. –Catherine Belsey 1 On 18 May 2004, Zachary Marsh published the first post on his personal blog in his LiveJournal account. Eighteen posts later, on 20 June 2004, Marsh revealed that he, like all members of his patrilineage from his great-great-great-grandfather onwards, was in fact a monster. This last post quite obviously revealed that this blog’s news was fiction, one adapted from ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, a fantasy author whose critical reception has been polarising. All of the blog’s posts appeared together as part of a satiric online news article by Matthew Baldwin on 21 June 2004 and entitled ‘The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh’. In A Future for Criticism, Catherine Belsey notes that fictions can reveal that ‘cultural attitudes and social behaviour are not always in step, especially at moments of transition’; we argue here that this fictitious online ‘news’ article significantly demonstrates this paradigm. Displaying the less critically esteemed features of blogs as sources for its humour, ‘The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh’ satirises blogs precisely at the time when they were transitioning into a numerically significant popular medium of literary expression. By also using the content of a fantasy writer who has at times been critically panned as a hack, ‘The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh’ further suggested a commensurate suspicion about blogs’ literary value. ‘The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh’ is a timely and telling cultural artefact of a moment of transition because it demonstrates that 1 Catherine Belsey, A Future for Criticism (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 75–76.