Sherry Chandler

from Julie Bosman in this morning’s NYTimes:

Starting this month, Robert F. X. Sillerman, the billionaire media entrepreneur who paid more than $100 million in 2005 for control of Elvis’s name and likeness — but not his music — plans to overhaul Graceland from a run-down tourist attraction into a sparkling destination resort.

The 128-room Heartbreak Hotel, which stands across Elvis Presley Boulevard from Graceland, will be demolished, along with the visitors center. In their place, Mr. Sillerman plans two 400-room hotels, convention space, an entertainment complex, restaurants, shops, an outdoor amphitheater and a spa.

Moreover, if Mr. Sillerman has his way, Elvis will become a big presence again in Las Vegas, in an interactive museum exhibit and Elvis theme show that Mr. Sillerman hopes will attract millions of visitors a year. Tapping Elvis’s international popularity is next: Mr. Sillerman envisions a 15,000-square-foot exhibit that will travel around the world.

And you thought Elvis was dead.

If there is any spot in the world where reason had a clear field it’s India; & the whole set-up in China is — or rather was — an enlightened liberal Deism which makes our 18th century look like what it was — cheap chinoiserie…The one unique thing about the West is its inability to perceive its lack of uniqueness, its dogma of peculiarity, its belief that God planned a high road for the West, with the Greeks contributing reason, Hebrews moral virtue, Romans law, English liberty, & Americans atomic bombs and sanitary napkins, & the East to rotate helplesly around its own navel until rescued by the West. The fact that the bloody world is round is one of the first things we learn & one of the last we ever believe.

— from Northrop Fry Unbuttoned. Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries (Gnomon, 2004)