If H. L. Mencken was the Sage of Baltimore, Waters is, at least, the parsley. Just for fun, consider what these two share: impudence, contrariness, uproarious insults to bourgeois values that made them controversial, then fashionable, then had them prematurely posing for their ­native-son statues. That they’d have horrified each other is just your usual Balmer lagniappe.

They’re also equally stubborn products of their times. At his most unreconstructed, Waters can brag, “I’m one of the few who voted for Obama because he was a friend of Bill Ayers,” which is both preening and stupid. Nonetheless, he’s more conscious than he used to be about the downside of his idea of fun. An initially sprightly tour of Baltimore’s dive bars (“the good ones have no irony about them”) sets up reminiscences of two local legends: a lesbian stripper who styled herself Lady Zorro and a Native American named Esther Martin, who ran a derelicts’ bar called the Wigwam “like an iron-fisted Elaine’s.” But then both women’s grown children tell him about their upbringings, packed with hair-­raising episodes of selfishness, booze, abuse and neglect. Glumly, Waters asks himself, “Can living in a real John Waters movie ever bring any kind of joy?” If that’s a self-centered way of putting things, it’s also an accurate one.

No wonder the most interesting chapter is the most conflicted: “Leslie” describes Waters’s friendship with Leslie Van Houten, the onetime Charles Manson follower who participated in the LaBianca murders and has been in prison, with one brief reprieve, for 40 years. Even as he makes a case that Van Houten should be paroled now that she’s “served more time than any Nazi war criminal,” Waters has to acknowledge his own sins. Not only did his film “Multiple Maniacs” burlesque the killings just months after the fact, but he attended “the insane LSD media-circus Manson trial” as an apparently qualm-free groupie. Considering that he still counts a “leather-­bound Baader-­Meinhof gang wanted-poster kit” among his prized possessions, his contrite tone here is evidently situational, if not tactical.

The more lightweight ­chapters include a fetching one about Waters’s reading habits (who’d have pegged him as an Ivy Compton-Burnett addict?) and another hyping the designs of Rei Kawakubo of ­Comme des Garçons. Despite his cloying conceit that the artists whose works he owns are his “roommates” — “Sometimes I don’t mind if my roommates are messy,” and so on — an essay explaining his fondness for, among others, Cy Twombly features at least one good wisecrack: “Aren’t maids the ultimate art critics?” Also nice is this praise of Twombly: “He makes perfect mistakes.”

But anyone who suspects that the display of Waters’s cultivated side means that Divine’s enabler has gone respectable will be dissuaded by “Outsider Porn.” This graphically besotted hymn to Bobby Garcia, who shot hundreds of videos of himself having sex with Marines, and David Hurles, whose gnarly, ultra-explicit male nudes Waters prefers to Robert Mapple­thorpe’s, is a reminder that he isn’t entirely kidding when he says, “Filth is just the beginning battle in the war on taste.”