Drabblecast 236 – When You Visit The Magoebaskloof Hotel..

[StalinSays]

Feature: When You Visit the Magoebaskloof Hotel Be Certain Not to Miss the Samango Monkeys by Elizabeth Bear
Drabble: Cloud and Sky by Chris Schryer



Friday, March 16th, 2012
In the place where I was born, stones had been used to mark boundaries for four hundred years. We harrowed stones up in fields, turned them up in roadcuts. We built the foundations of houses from stones, dug around and between them. We made stone walls, and our greatest poet wrote poems about those walls and their lichen-speckled granite. The gift of glaciers, and the wry joke of farmers. “She’ll grow a ton and a half an acre, between the stones.” The people who lived there before mine made tools of them, made weights and currency.

Art by Kelly MacAvaney

Twabble: ""Grampy, have you heard of the Grandfather time travel paradox?" she whispers. I can only nod, because of the duct tape." by Zedaysi

[normsherman]

Quick order of business - People's Choice voting is indeed closed. Announcement of winners in ep. 237.

[uncre8d1]

Thanks again for picking my drabble, Norm. It sounded great!

[Polecat]

Having listened to the story a couple of times, I have come to the conclusion the this piece of speculative fiction belongs in the genre because it leads one to speculate what the h*** Ms. Bear is trying to communicate. This is not to criticise the writing or the style - the fact that I chose to listen several times (and enjoyed the experience) testifies to the quality of the piece. I just have no clue what it is about.
Any ideas?

respectfully

The Polecat

[cinnamon]

Man, it's hard to be a vervet in a samango world.

[Unblinking]

My name in the podcast!

*Ahem* I'm pretty much with Polecat on this one. I have no idea what was trying to be communicated. I thought I understood what was happening at any given time (though the flashbacks left me temporally confused for a while), but at the end I didn't really get what the story was about as a whole, especially ending as it did in midflashback mentioning that everyone made it out of the burning building alive. WTF? Somehow the burning milk from the alien nipple reminded him of burning buildings? Did the monkeys burn down the building? No clue.

[tbaker2500]

Hah! Wow! For the first time, I felt not much trouble understanding this story, while others struggled!!

First off, I loved the repeating imagery of rocks.

This story, as I interpreted it, is simply about how one cannot control the environment, the environment controls you (said in the story), and how you need to adapt to survive. The Earth froze, and we needed to leave to survive. The building burning down was a metaphor for that, how in fact we got off the planet alive.
In trying to dissect the dead, we again we trying to take control. Where in fact, we were forced to drink the mama's milk which microbes were either going to let us live in this new environment, or die. To quote cinnamon,

Man, it's hard to be a vervet in a samango world.

To break it down another way, Earth, and the Magoebaskloof Hotel = Alien world and us.

Great intros and outros, great drabbles and twabbles. Story was very good, I enjoyed it.

[strawman]

We all remember how yucky those Gerber strained carrots tasted, right? After all, in our last world, our mouths weren't even used to put food in.

[normsherman]

Man, it's hard to be a vervet in a samango world.

This story, as I interpreted it, is simply about how one cannot control the environment, the environment controls you (said in the story), and how you need to adapt to survive. The Earth froze, and we needed to leave to survive. The building burning down was a metaphor for that

Well said!

So, I had a feeling that if it were indeed a real place, Magoebaskloof would have a weird pronunciation. Upon googling it I found that it is indeed a real place, one that I very much want to go to now (looks beautiful!), and one that very few people on the internet bother teaching the pronunciation too. Figure I'd just butcher it and learn that way, like a good xenobiologist.

[cinnamon]

Honestly, I feel like I rarely "get" stories. I either enjoy them or I don't, but it's not that often that I ponder or grasp a deeper meaning as far as I'm aware.

[shagin]

Vag yeast moonshine for the win!

[Unblinking]

Honestly, I feel like I rarely "get" stories. I either enjoy them or I don't, but it's not that often that I ponder or grasp a deeper meaning as far as I'm aware.

I guess when I say I "get" a story, it doesn't necessarily mean that I feel that I grasped deeper meanings necessarily (though that can contribute). Rather, when I say I don't "get" a story, it feels like I didn't even grasp the surface ideas. Like, if I felt that a story was supposed to be a comedy but I didn't understand the jokes. A lot of times the choice of ending will confuse me, because usually the choice of where to end a story has some meaning, often tying off a character or plot arc. In this one, when it ended by saying that no one died in the building fire in the flashback, that really confused me because I didn't understand why those flashbacks were relevant at all, let alone why ending the story with that particular bit was relevant. If it had ended with the protagonist suckling from the alien then I could understand how that served as a resolution one way or the other (I'm not sure I would've considered it a great ending but I would've felt that I understood it).

So in this case, that extra scene just confused the hell out of me.

[zZzacha]

Nice story! And a very nice analysis, tbaker2500!

So, I had a feeling that if it were indeed a real place, Magoebaskloof would have a weird pronunciation. Upon googling it I found that it is indeed a real place, one that I very much want to go to now (looks beautiful!), and one that very few people on the internet bother teaching the pronunciation too. Figure I'd just butcher it and learn that way, like a good xenobiologist.

I googled 'Magoebaskloof' too, found that it is in South Africa. So I guess the pronounciation is a bit on the Dutch side, although I think Christi might want to correct me there. I would pronouce it "Mah-goo-bahs-cloaf" (that's weird, typing a Dutch pronounciation using English syllables). I think the last part of the name is 'kloof', which means 'ravine' or 'gap' in Dutch: the Magoebas Ravine.

Norm, I do love your efforts of pronouncing Magoebaskloof! Especially the 'g', that's a very tough one to pronounce and you did it very well. There must be a Dutch/South African man hidden deep inside you. Can you say "Scheveningen"? (okay, now I'm overdoing it)