Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...filed for the firemen's examination as clearly as a king remembers his coronation ... I was ecstatic that I would soon be a part of the gong clangs and siren howls . . . climbing ladders, pulling hose, and saving children from the waltz of the hot-masked devil. Tearful mothers would embrace me, editorial writers would extol me, mayors would pin medals and ribbons to my breast...
...then they lead Terry in and Mr. Chick sucks in the air his cheeks are puffed out and his eyes bug out and his shoulders draw back in the classical Chick and all of the sudden the little man with the beerbelly is a hulking 30 pounds bigger, a devil bird about to tear apart the cop station and Terry has this big bruise over his eye you know, either from running into a branch drunk as a skunk with the cops charged in or from banging his head against the cage in the cop car, and Terry says...
MUCH LIKE Nathaniel Hawthorne, she fixes sin symbolically in a way strangely inorganic to her tale, but organic to the terror of sin and hell and the devil and the apocalypse which are the common denominators of her characters' psyches. These "fixes" themselves are apocalyptic, perversely so. As the "A" is burned into the flesh over Dimmesdale's heart in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Mrs. May's heart in "Greenleaf" is gored by the bull that her handyman, Greenleaf, cannot keep penned...
Others in the tight Ibiza circle-a raffish collection reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart's Beat the Devil-added color to the story. There was Elmyr de Hory, the slightly flamboyant art forger who is the principal figure in Irvine's book Fake! Another good friend is Gerry Albertini, an idle millionaire with dual British-American citizenship who, apparently as a favor, once kept Irving's Hughes manuscript in his safe on the island...
...wings, and never seen, is a devil ex machina, Simmo, a man who strip-mines simple souls like Bentley. Buzo tells us that the meek do not in herit the earth, and that the power-brutes who do pocket only cinders...