"He was a gay, mad young dog, grandly careless of his largess, fearless as a lion's whelp, lithe and beautiful as a leopard, and mad, a trifle mad of the
deviltries and whimsies that tickled in that fine brain of his.
They gathered up scraps of food which had touched his lips, an empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut from which he had drunk, and even his spittle, and performed all kinds of
deviltries over them.
The only thing that was really laughable about Kissimmee's agitation over the
deviltries of aerial craft was the fact that it was somewhat premature.
To "prove" this, the Thernstroms have come up with a blizzard of statistics reminiscent of the late Robert Benchley's "Treasurer's Report" in order to make the case that blacks were really getting their act together from 1945 until the sixties, when affirmative action, welfare and other liberal
deviltries so spoiled them that they took to drugs and murder while, most tragic of all, not living up to "our" S.A.T.
Early in the book, Steiner speaks of how she finds Mapplethorpe's sadomasochistic photographs "thrilling," and how his deviltry gives her license to enjoy her own: "Mapplethorpe stands there, a self-proclaimed devil, and warrants my right to enjoy my own
deviltries" (56,57).
In 1925 he published a book of satirical fantasies, Dyavoliada ("
Deviltries"; Diaboliad), implicitly critical of Soviet society.
