Live from Pension Rückert

Coincidentally, Rückert is my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. But here the B & B is named after a 19th-century poet, Friedrich Rückert. There are quotations from his poems stenciled on the walls, including in my room.

I love European train travel. Although the one I took yesterday to get here was slow because it stopped a lot, the trip from Zagreb to Graz was calm and I had a compartment to myself most of the time. We traveled through Slovenia, so I had to show my ticket to three different conductors and my passport—my “dokumenti”—to two different border control people. The Slovenian one also asked me questions and checked out my passport number. Of course, I’m legit, so no worries. When asked why I was going to Austria I got to say that I was going to give a lecture at the university. Finally, at age 52, I feel like a professional professor lady. There’s something about being outside of my own country that affirms this.

The university of Graz organizes a speaker series on Canadian literature and culture (French and English), and I was the first speaker of this year’s series. As the organizer—the esteemed Dr. Ertler—said to me later, the first speaker is very important because if the talk goes well, the students will return for subsequent ones. And apparently mine went well. There were about 40 people there, mainly undergrad students but also some other faculty and a visiting writer. I connected the discourse of Canadian multiculturalism, as it currently signifies in Canada in all of its muddleness, to two recent events: the controversy over the “Too Asian?” article in Maclean’s magazine, which implied that Asian Canadians are not real Canadians; and the performance of a play, The Last 15 Seconds by the MT Space theatre company in K-W which told a Middle Eastern story but did so in an entirely multicultural Canadian way. Then I connected all that to the role literature plays in encouraging citizens to remember histories—sometimes Canadian histories and sometimes histories of other places, other peoples. Or at least I did something like that. The audience was receptive and they asked good questions afterwards.

In Austria they don’t applaud by clapping their hands but by knocking on the desk. It sounded weird to my ear. More like a judge’s gavel coming down in a courtroom. Knocking on a desk signifies “shut up” to me, not “thank you.”

Today I get to be a tourist again. My train doesn’t leave until 6:30 this evening, so I’ve got the whole day to wander around Graz, which is a very pretty place. I’ll post photos later.

On the train yesterday I stared out of the window for most of the journey. Slovenia is very hilly. I wonder if they call those big hills mountains. The train followed a river. What is that river called? No doubt it empties into the Danube. Last bits of snow clung to the north sides at the upper elevations, but by the river trees are becoming ever-so-slightly tinged with green. Farmers’ fields are narrow and long. Here in Graz I have seen snowdrops and crocuses. The sun is shining.