Word: cuckooland
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...supercilious drawing master points to the model she must copy. In the crammed, tilted space, the heads on their distorted bodies swell grotesquely, like pale masks. Every detail of costume is there-one could dress an opera from Traversi-but the whole has gone awry: we gaze into a cuckooland of cultural pretension. Small wonder that Traversi failed to get the big commissions; but his work stays in the mind long after the more decorative things in this show, the chalky allegories of the arts, the fêtes champêtres and royal hunting scenes, have blurred together...
...mythology, essential to the twentieth-century American funeral rite has grown up--or rather has been built up step by step--to justify the peculiar customs surrounding the disposal of our dead... Gradually, almost imperceptibly, over the years the funeral men have constructed their own grotesque cloud-cuckooland where the trappings of Gracious Living are transformed, as in a nightmare, into the trappings of Gracious Dying... The emphasis is one the same desirable qualities that we have all been schooled to look for in our daily search for excellence: comfort, durability, beauty, craftsmanship." From THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH...
Gumchewer Rogers was abroad, leering at statesmen, buildings, people, scenery. "Yours aquatically," he signed his cables. "Yours politically. . . Yours imploringly. . . Regards to 'Cuckooland.' " Readers could only picture the editors of the Times screaming with laughter at lines like: "Don't put too much faith, you Democrats, in rumors that peasants of the Middle West will defeat Coolidge. They change with the wheat crops and he has two to go." Or, "A bunch of American tourists were hissed and stoned yesterday in France, but not until they had finished shopping." Or, "Suzanne Lenglen has been landed by Pyle...
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