Saturday, June 02, 2007

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 divorcĂ©es 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).

3 comments:

  1. Thanks to you, Jenny, for originally tipping me off to Maddox's column. And I agree that he has a delightful style.

    ReplyDelete
  2. no argument here. then again i am myself Bruno Maddox, thanking Jenny again for her kind words, and demanding a beverage event when I'm back in town, week after next.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Bruno. There was some doubt as to your existence at Wikipedia very recently. This craziness piqued my interest so I read your novel. It was just typical Wikipedia misinformation as usual but My Little Blue Dress was an excellent read. I plan to give it away (another copy, not mine) as a gift to the next Michelle I meet. It's Edgar Award worthy. Are you writing more novels of that kind?

    ReplyDelete