Wednesday, November 4/2015

There were choices in the public lecture available for tonight but there was a promising grandness to the15th Hellenic Observatory Annual Lecture, and its title, The Hypocrisy of European Moralism: Greece and the politics of cultural aggression, sounds interesting. And the speaker is a Harvard professor. It's a little downhill from there, though. Comfortable seats in a small theatre and we're early enough for front row. The talk itself is pretty rapid fire, largely because it is, speaker Michael Herzfeld admits, an article prepared for publication, and fitting it into the allotted hour is a virtuoso speed performance. Which makes it significantly more difficult to follow. The gist is that Greece is neither innocent of corruption and incompetence nor the ugly stereotype of western European accusations. Fair enough, and not really controversial. Bit of a performance though, with seemingly irrelevant snippets of erudition thrown in, along with untranslated phrases in Greek for what seems to be a primarily non-Greek audience. Be interesting to see if there's a transcript - some points seemed worth slower speed focus.