Lousy with golden ratios

There are a handful of writers whose prose styles make me envious in a peculiarly enjoyable way--it is a miracle that people can write like this!--and my friend Bruno Maddox is one of them; check out his latest Blinded by Science column, on beauty:

As Los Angeles plastic surgeons go, Marquardt (now retired from clinical practice) was the serious, unsleazy sort. His patients weren’t the standard Valley girls and divorcées whose breasts a doctor could breezily augment to the tinkle of a Japanese water feature before checking his teeth in the shine of his scalpel and heading off for cocktails at Skybar. His patients were deformed. They were people who were born without chins or who had taken a speedboat turbine to the face. And they came to him with dreams not of gorgeousness or superstardom but of one day being able to ingest food orally.

(Thanks to Lowebrow for the link.)

NB does anyone still read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with its cubist nose? When I was a Young Person it was very popular--but the cult-following teenage favorites of the 1980s now seem incomparably unvoguish (last week I had to read a chunk of Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, he's a highly readable writer but it seems almost inconceivably dated now--but I think people are still reading Kurt Vonnegut--no idea about, oh, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I expect it's still pretty popular).