The Quaker Ranter

Advice to a new blogger

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:01:26 -0500

Over the QuakerQuaker forum, a new blogger asked "I am new at blogging. Do you have any suggestions for my site?" I'll cross-post my answer here.

I think the success to any kind of writing is to first and foremost write about what interests you. Don't worry about whether there's an audience or not: with millions of people on the internet every day there's bound to be plenty of others who share your interests. Don't be afraid to be personal, quirky and idiosyncratic, as people come to blogs looking for personality.

The most interesting blogs have an intimacy and honesty to them. My blog posts are the kind of discussions I would have around my dining room table. Friends have a tendency to downplay our opinions in public settings. The Quaker blogs have given us a place to be respectfully honest, open and inquisitive. That openness has led many of us into surprising friendships.

I'd also recommend that you keep your blog open to development. I was four months into my QuakerRanter blog before I had the first post that I would now consider a "typical" QuakerRanter piece. It often takes time to find a voice you're comfortable in and many people find themselves interested in different topics than they initially imagined. Blogs often end up being very different than the one they thought they were starting! Most blogs last about two months and are abandoned: if you're blogging because you think you should be, then the motivation won't be enough to sustain you over the long term.

Finally, blogs are social. They're conversation. Encourage conversation on your blog. Respond to comments, on the blog and also in direct emails if people have provided them. Sign up to blogs you like using an RSS Reader like Google Reader or Bloglines and read them and comment on thoughtful posts. Get to know people and try to attend the events we're now listing here on QuakerQuaker. About half of my QuakerQuaker time is actually private emails and IM conversations with Friends and the comments I leave on blogs (some Quaker, some not) are often more involved than my blog posts. It's a social medium and the public blog is just one piece of that.

I'd love to hear what advice others have, either here on Quaker Ranter or over on the Forum post.

Quakers and Christmas aka the annual Scrooge post

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:48:31 -0500

It's that season again, the time when unprogrammed Friends talk about Christmas. Click Ric has posted about the seeming incongruity of his meeting's Christmas tree and LizOpp has reprinted a still-timely letter from about five years ago about the meeting's children Christmas pageant.

Friends traditionally have lumped Christmas in with all of the other ritualistic boo-ha that mainstream Christians practice. These are outward elements that should be abandoned now that we know Christ has come to teach the people himself and is present and available to all of us at all times. Outward baptism, communion, planned sermons, paid ministers, Christmas and Easter: all distractions from true Christian religion, from primitive Chritianity revived.

One confusion that arises in liberal meetings this time of year is that it's assumed it's the Christian Friends who want the Christmas tree. Arguments sometime break out with "hyphenated" Friends who feel uncomfortable with the tree: folks who consider themselves Friends but also Pagan, Nontheistic, or Jewish and wonder why they're having Christianity forced on them. But those of us who follow what we might call the "Christian tradition as understood by Friends" should be just as put out by a Christmas tree and party. We know that symbolic rituals like these spark disunity and distract us from the real purpose of our community: befriending Christ and listening for His guidance.

I was shocked and startled when I first learned that Quaker schools used to meet on Christmas day. My first response was "oh come on, that's taking it all too far." But it kept bugging me and I kept trying to understand it. This was one of the pieces that helped me understand the Quaker way better and I finally grew to understand the rationale. If Friends were more consistent with more-or-less symbolic stuff like Christmas, it would be easier to teach Quakerism.

I don't mind Christmas trees, per se. I have one in my living room (right). In my extended family Christmas has served as one of the mandatory times of year we all have to show up together for dinner. It's never been very religious, so I never felt I needed to stop the practice when I became involved with Friends. But as a Friend I'm careful not to pretend that the consumerism and social rituals have much to do with Christ. Christmas trees are pretty. The lights make me feel good in the doldrums of mid-winter. That's reason enough to put one up.

Unprogrammed liberal Friends could use the tensions between traditional Quakerly stoicism and mainstream Christian nostalgia as a teaching moment, and we could use discomfort around the ritual of Christmas as a point of unity and dialog with Pagan, Jewish and Non-theistic Friends. Christian Friends are always having to explain how we're not the kind of Christians others assume we are (others both within and outside the Society). Being principled about Christmas is one way of showing that difference. People will surely say "oh come on," but so what? A lot of spiritual seekers are critical of the kind of crazy commercial spending sprees that marked Christmas's past and I don't see why a group saying Christmas isn't about Christ would be at a particular disadvantage during this first Christmas season of the next Great Depression.

I've been talking about liberal unprogrammed Friends. For the record, I understand Christmas celebrations among "pastoral" and/or "programmed" Friends. They've made a conscious decision to adopt a more mainstream Christian approach to religious education and ministry. That's fine. It's not the kind of Quaker I practice, but they're open about their approach and Christmas makes sense in that context.

Whenever I post this kind of stuff on my blog I get comments how I'm being too Scroogey. Well I guess I am. Bah Humbug. Honestly though, I've always like Quaker Christmas parties. They're a way of mixing things up, a way of coming together as a community in a warmer way that we usually do. People stop confabbing about committee questions and actually enjoy one another's company. One time I asked my meeting to call it the Day the World Calls Christmas Party, which I thought was kind of clever (everyone else surely thought "there goes Martin again"). The joy of real community that is filled once a year at our Christmas parties might be symptom of a hunger to be a different kind of community every week, even every day.

True confessions

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 19:13:50 -0500

Just posted over on Tumblr: "Confessions of a Disney Addict." Yes, it's become impossible to maintain an ironic detachment from Walt Disney World. I like the place and the quality family time we have there.

I now have a ton of work to do that coincides with the poverty of having blown the bank account. That means I'll be working a lot, so don't expect a lot of posts here on the Quaker Ranter until after I've caught up a bit.

Vacation time

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:54:34 -0500

There won't be many blog posts for awhile as we've recently started a two-week trip. First stop: Savannah, Georgia by New Jersey Transit and Amtrak. Tuesday we drive south to lovely Walt Disney World for a return engagement at the Polynesian. Pictures up under the trip08 tag on Flickr, at least till internet access (probably) falls off in Orlando.

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Above: Lunch aboard the Whistlestop Cafe in Savannah Georgia, a converted rail car turned restaurant adjacent to the Roundhouse Museum.

Quaker Categories

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:51:29 -0500

Just finished setting up the old QuakerQuaker categories onto the new site. Here are links to each of them:

blogs, books, christianity, clearness, community, conservative, convergent, diversity, evangelical, green, liberal, ministry, parenting, plain, sexuality, universalism, videos, witness, youth.

When you write or see a good linkable URL that you think belongs in these categories, just bookmark it using the http://del.icio.us system using "quaker.whatever" as it's tag. For example, a post about Convergent Friends should be tagged quaker.convergent

QuakerQuaker on the move

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:06:29 -0500

Yes it's true Virginia, QuakerQuaker has moved to it's new digs. It's all chaotic but fun, so go check it out. Comments, kudos or complaints can be dropped on the feedback discussion or as a comment here. More features will be coming soon, but then aren't they always? A big shout out of thanks to recent QQ donors who helped make this possible and to the brave early adopters who have been testing the site for the past couple of weeks.

View my page on QuakerQuaker
QQ is also a great source for info on Quaker Events, Quaker videos and Quaker photos.

The Quaker testimonies as our collective wisdom wiki

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:13:59 -0500

My sort-of response to Callid's great Youtube piece on the Quaker testimonies, I compare the classic testimonies to a wiki: the collective knowledge of Friends distilled into specific cautions and guides. "We as Friends have found that...." I do talk about how the recent "SPICE" simplification (simplicity, integrity, integrity, community and equality) has robbed our notion of testimonies of some of their power.

A President who looks like us

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:46:42 -0500

That man with the funny name is going to be President. And all I can think about is the pride I feel that we've finally made it to the White House. We? Well yes, I am about as white as they come. Put me on the beach for ten minutes and I'm burnt through. Blue eyes and blond hair, my boys would have no sign-up problems for the Aryan youth league. But that skin color masks a complicated family history and abstracted ethnicity. My father, like Barack's, had multiple families and my mother, like Barack's, had children with different fathers. I have paternal half-siblings I've never met and a maternal half-sibling who I've always simply called my brother. No one in my family shares my Irish last name, which is fine by me because my only real Irish heritage is the name of my father's father's father. My accent, my tastes and my cultural references are all pretty much generic American.

A few generations ago everyone in my family had clear ethnic identities. They lived in enclaves of people like them, went to churches full of people like them and worked the jobs their people worked. I never had any of that. In school I was always vaguely jealous of the kids who had strong roots and relationships that were familial. But I was always an outsider to those networks, always sitting at the lunch tables of other outsiders. As I grew older I became more adept at finding outsider communities and my identity remains largely self-chosen and self-created.

This is kind of complicated identity is increasingly common not only in the United States, but throughout the world. And even the complexities of the complicated swirl about when you think of the ever-increasing gender identities and the minority of families now made up of a mom, dad and 2.5 kids.

This election is a victory for merit over family. George W Bush was a lousy student who never would have even been accepted to Yale if his father and grandfather hadn't been prominent U.S. Senators. The Navy would never have given mediocre student John McCain a fighter jet if his father and grandfather hadn't been admirals (and they would have taken the keys away after he crashed one after another after another before that final crash over North Vietnam). Al Gore? Son and grandson of U.S. Senators. John Kerry? Not quite so golden, with a secret paternal Jewish ancestry so hushed up that even Kerry didn't know about it, but his mother was from the Forbes family and a rich aunt paid his way through school.

Bill Clinton is the only recent presidential politician I can think of with a truly complicated family life and like Barack and Michelle Obama he owes his education to scholarships received as the reward of hard work and merit. A revolution took place a generation ago when universities started opening up and accepting students based on grades and that revolution has swept into the White House, first with Bill Clinton and now even more dramatically with Barack Obama.

And me? Well, to be perfectly honest I'm still a bit jealous of those who belong somewhere. I remain vaguely embarrassed by my last name. I can be defensive that I didn't inherit my religious identity. I still have a deer-in-the-headlights moment of anxiety when someone casually inquires about my ancestry and I live in a town where you're a transient if you don't go back three generations. If you want to ask me about my family life, you'd better be ready to invest a couple of hours studying flow-charts. But come January I'll be able to look at the President of the United States and see someone who looks like me. And increasingly like us.

Invisible Quaker Misfits

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 09:55:38 -0500

This week I received an email from a young seeker in the Philadelphia area who found my 2005 article "Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings" published in FGConnections. She's a former youth ministries leader from a Pentecostal tradition, strongly attracted to Friends beliefs but not quite fitting in with the local meetings she's been trying. Somewhere she found my article and asks if I have any insights.

The 2005 article was largely pessimistic, focused on the "committed, interesting and bold twenty-something Friends I knew ten years ago" who had left Friends and blaming "an institutional Quakerism that neglected them and its own future" but my hope paragraph was optimistic:

There is hope... A great people might possibly be gathered from the emergent church movement and the internet is full of amazing conversations from new Friends and seekers. There are pockets in our branch of Quakerism where older Friends have continued to mentor and encourage meaningful and integrated youth leadership, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most hopefully, there's a whole new generation of twenty- something Friends on the scene with strong gifts that could be nurtured and harnessed.

Hard to imagine that only three years ago I was an isolated FGC staffer left to pursue outreach and youth ministry work on my own time by an institution indifferent to either pursuit. Both functions have become major staff programs, but I'm no longer involved, which is probably just as well, as neither program has decided to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most interesting work is still largely invisible.

Some of this work has been taken up by the new bloggers and by some sort of alt-network that seems to be congealing around all the blogs, Twitter networks, Facebook friendships, intervisitations and IM chats. Many of us associated with QuakerQuaker.org have some sort of regular correspondence or participation with the Emerging Church movement, we regularly highlight "amazing conversations" from new Friends and seekers and there's a lot of inter-generational work going on. We've got a name for it in Convergent Friends, which reflects in part that "we" aren't just the liberal Friends I imagined in 2005, but a wide swath of Friends from all the Quaker flavors.

But we end up with a problem that's become the central one for me and a lot of others: what can we tell a new seeker who should be able to find a home in real-world Friends but doesn't fit? I could point this week's correspondent to meetings and churches hundreds of miles from her house, or encourage her to start a blog, or compile a list of workshops or gatherings she might attend. But none of these are really satisfactory answers.

Elsewhere:

Gathering in Light Wess sent an email around last night about a book review done by his PhD advisor Ryan Bolger that talks about tribe-style leadership and a new kind of church identity that uses the instant communication tools of the internet to forge a community that's not necessarily limited to locality. Bolger's and his research partner report that they see "emerging initiatives within traditional churches as the next horizon for the spread of emerging church practices in the United States." More links from Wess' article on emerging churches and denominations.

Donation Time

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 08:33:10 -0500

QuakerQuaker readers: the annual hosting bill for QuakerQuaker.org is due Tuesday. Friday was payday but doing the math it all has to go into that pesky mortgage along. You all know I spend way too much time scanning blogs, corresponding with Friends and building the community. So please help out with the server bill. $100 donation will keep the site up for another year. If I get more I'll be able to launch the next version in the next month or so. So please help keep the lights on and Donate Now!

(This link updated now)
Thanks y'all, Martin

Our Christian Disciplines tweet the Debate

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:22:43 -0500

John S made an interesting comment at the end of my last post (all ) about live twittering tonight's Presidential Debate got me thinking about a Quaker response to the debates might be. As I've admitted I can be rather snarky and partisan. So I prepared some interesting quotes from some old Quaker tesimonies and have been sprinkling them throughout my twitter commentary.

1762: Friends ought not be active in electing to offices, the execution whereof tends to lay wast our Christian testimony
<1879: Members should maintain inoffensive, circumspect emeanour towards all men, manifesting peaceable spirit of Christ.
<1879: Friends should avoid those heats & controversies respecting the policies and govt's of the world.
1874: The mere natural wisdom and will of man have no palce in the church of Christ.
1808: The preservation of love and unity is a duty in every state of religious attainment.
1853: It is upon the simplicity of the Truth as it is in Jesus that our testimony to plainness and moderation rests.
<1879: Friends are to avoid electing brethren to civil govt as may subject them to temptation of violating testimonies.
1808: Friends are not to unite in warlike measures, either offensive or defensive, we are subj of Messaih's peaceful reign.
1843: Fds must decline acceptance of any office or station in civil govt w/duties inconsistent w/our religious principles.
1843: Friends warned vs. raising & circulating paper credit w/appearance of value w/o intrinsic reality.
1843: Friends should be open-hearted and liberal in raising funds for relief for members in indigent circumstances.
1843: So may we be living members of the Church militant on earth; and inhabitants of that city which hath foundations.
1853: The standards which the world adopts in pursuit of trade and desire for riches in not safe for disciple of Christ.
1853: May no Friends involve themselves in worldy concerns disqualify for right use of their time, talents & temporal substance.

The quotes are culled from "Christian Advices" (1879) and "Rules of Discipline" (1843), both published by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. I think these are Orthodox and Hicksite respectively, but I'm not an expert in the investigative details necessary to differentiate between yearly meeting publications. If anyone knows "Christian Advices" says it's available from the Friends Bookstore at 304 Arch Street; "Rules of Discipline" is printed by John Richards of 130 N. Third Street.

Mixing Quakers and Politics?

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:15:52 -0500

Update: I'll be adding #qqtalk to tonight's live Twitter blog of the Presidential debate. If you have a Twitter account you can just follow me at "martin_kelley" and non-Twitter users can see all the qqtalk posts by going to this "qqtalk" page. And definitely check out the fascinating discussions happening in the comments of this post!

Wess of GatheringinLight just emailed me if we might designate a "qqtalk" tag for those of us QuakerQuaker regulars who are live-blogging tonight's presidential debate on Twitter.com. Interesting idea but I'm worried that it will be too partisan. I, for one, have not been live blogging the debates as a Friend.

I've taken a lot of care to keep QuakerQuaker culturally-neutral so that we keep the focus on the faith. I want it to be a place where people from different backgrounds and values will find common ground in their interest in the role of Quaker tradition in their lives. I'm a leftie East Coast Christian anarco-pacifist--vegan, bike rider, you get the picture, right?--and while I can argue that my values jibe with my understanding of Quaker faith, I would never want to presume that you have to adopt them to be a good Quaker.

Part of the problem with Quakerism in all of its forms is that we've mixed up the faith with the culture and sometimes don't know where one ends and the other begins. That's kind of natural but it's led to a situation where we're sometimes divided against one another over the wrong issues. We also use the words "Quaker" or "Friends" as a shortcut for a range of values and don't do the work explaining how the faith leads to the values.

So in the few hours we have till the debate, any ideas about whether to adopt a qqtalk tag? Drop them in the comments. Also, if you're a Quaker who's going to be live-twittering tonight, leave your twitter name below so people can see what we're doing on an individual level if they want.

I'll start off:

I'm at http://twitter.com/martin_kelley and have been using #debate08 for my debate coverage.

Same as it ever was

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:45:14 -0500

Over on One Quaker Take, Timothy is surprised to read a definition of "Convergent Friend" that sounds a lot like a certain flavor of West Coast liberal Quakerism. It doesn't seem so surprising for me as it comes from Gregg Koskela, a pastor at an Evangelical Friends church. It was five years ago this month that I went to a loud pizza shop in Philadelphia to attend a "Meet-Up" of readers of emerging church blogs and realized I had more common ground with these younger Evangelicals than I would have ever thought:

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it's safe to say we are all "post" something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren't working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There's something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it's finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we're more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

Rich the Brooklyn Quaker was recently asking about early Friends views of atonement and heaven and hell and it's a great post, but so is Marshall Massey's comment about how later Friends altered the message in distinctly different ways. The different flavors of Friends have spent a lot of energy minimizing certain parts of the Quaker message and over-emphasizing others and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.

I have a working theory that a movement of "Convergence" will feel suspiciously liberal in evangelical circles, suspiciously evangelical in liberal circles, and suspiciously worldly in Quaker conservative circles. But that's almost to be expected. The work to be done is different depending on where we're starting from.

I don't think Friends are alone in these kinds of matters. I see this phenomenon in other religious denominations--the post-Evangelicals I broke pizza with back in 2003 weren't Quakers. But Friends might have a better way out of the existential puzzles that arise. For we (generally) believe that our action should be motivated first and foremost by the direct instruction of the risen Christ working on us now. That means we can't rely on canned answers. What worked in the past might not work now. The faith is the same. But what needs to be done and what needs to be preached is very much a here-and-now kind of proposition.

I can't help but think of Howard Brinton. Back in the 1950s his generation managed a reunification of East Coast Quaker factions that had been warring for over a century. One way they did it was hanging out together and then redefining what it meant to be a Friend. In Friends for 300 Years, Brinton argued that tests for membership shouldn't look at one's beliefs or practices. It was a truce and I'm sure it made sense at the time: there was a fairly strong consensus on what Quakerism meant and the fights at the edges over details were distracting. Fifty years later, there's little consensus among Philadelphia Friends and even those in leadership positions are loathe to talk about faith or practice except in a kind of code. I can't think of a single Philadelphia Friend who publicly expresses Quaker belief with the clarity or passion of mid-century figures like Brinton, Thomas Kelly or Rufus Jones.

What worked in the past might not work now. What sounds like old hat to to us might be very liberating for others. Convergence isn't very new. It's just keeping ourselves from ossifying into our own human concepts and staying open to the direct Christ. It's finding a way to maintain that crazy balance between tradition and the inward light. Same as it ever was.

Getting ready for tonight's #vpdebate

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:09:25 -0500

I expect to be live blogging tonight's debate between Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin. Join me on my Twitter feed 9pm Eastern. It looks like the Twitterverse will be congregating around #vpdebate (see update, below), so go there for your entertainment and you'll see my snarky commentary in the mix.

The NYTimes has a handly "What to Look For" guide for the debate. It looks to be quite fun indeed. Update: Twitter seems not be updating very quickly. CSPAN's debate Twitter pull seems much more reliable.

Sorting Quaker peculiarities in the modern world

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:02:23 -0500

Friends never set out to start to their own religion; what became seen as the more "peculiar" Quaker practices were simply their interpretation of the proper mode of christian living. At some point some of these practices became forms, things done because that's what Quakers are supposed to do. The emptiness of this rationale led some of those in later generations to abandon them altogether. Neither path is very satisfactory. Those of us inspired by the Quaker tradition and have to sift through the half-remembered ancient forms to understand their rationale and continued relevancy.

When reading through Thomas Clarkson's account of Friends circa 1800, I was struck by the differing lengths of explanation needed for two customs. read earlier installments of my series you'll know that Thomas Clarkson was a British Anglican who spent a lot of time with Friends around the turn of the 19th Century and published an invaluable multi-volumn apology in 1806. "A Portraiture of Quakerism" explains contemporary Friends practices and defends them as legitimate ways to lead a "christian" life.

The two practices that struck me were 1: the Quaker custom of using "thee" in speech and, 2: of using numbers for the names of days of the week and months of the year. Clarkson makes a good defense of the reasons behind the practices:

Many of the expressions, then in use, appeared to him to contain gross flattery, others to be idolatrous, others to be false representatives of the ideas they were intended to convey... Now he considered that christianity required truth, and he believed therefore that he and his followers, who prefessed to be christians in word and deed, and to follow the christian pattern in all things, as far as it could be found, were called upon to depart from all the censurable modes of seech, as much as they were from any of the customs of the world, which christianity had deemed objetionable. (p. 275-6, my edition, p. 199 in this edition in Google Books).

Clarkson takes the next four pages to explain some grammatical history. In Fox's time, "thee" was still at the tail end of being replaced by the grammatically-incorrect "you" for the second person singular, a cultural change that was a "trickle down" of the courtier's desire to flatter so-called superiors in church and state. To a band of religious reformers largely drawn from rural North England, the reappropriation of "thee" was a bold cultural statement. It spoke to both a grammatical integrity and a desire to flatten social classes in a radically idealistic religious society.

Following the history lesson, Clarkson turns to names of the days of the week and months of the years. Most are pagan names. Good christians seeking to honor the one true God and deny any false gods shouldn't spend their days invoking the Norse gods Tyr and Woden or the Roman gods Janus, Mars. Replacing them by Third Day, Fourth Day, First Month and Third Month strips them of their roots in non-christian cultures.

As Clarkson well knew, the question 150 years later (and now 350 years later) is whether these old peculiar customs carry any weight beyond a kind of 17th Century Quaker nostalgia. As he writes:

There is great absurdity, it is said, in supposing, that persons pay any respect to heathen idols, who retain the use of the ancient names of the divisions of time. How many thousands are there, who know nothing of their origin? The common people of the country know none of the reasons.

When I look at old customs I ask two questions:

The Elevator rule: could I explain to my peculiarity to a non-Quaker "average Joe" in under two minutes?
The Christian rule: could I make the argument that this practice is not just a Quaker oddity but something that every faithful and earnest Christian should consider adopting?

In these cases, thee fails and numbered days passes.

Let me explain: I can't really explain why I would use thee without going into a explanation of pre-17th Century grammar, talking about different forms of second person singular in the history of the English language and the retention of the second person singular in most romance languages. By the time I'd be done I'd come off as an over-educated bore.

In contrast I can say "Wednesday is named after the Norse god Woden, Thursday after Thor, January after the Roman Janus, etc., and as a one-God Christian I don't want to spend my days invoking their names constantly." A one-sentence explanation works even in modern America. I'll still be seen as an odd duck (nothing wrong with that) but at least people will leave the conversation knowing there's someone who thinks we really should be serious about only worshipping one God: mission accomplished, really.

I know faithful Friends who do use thee. I'm glad they do and don't want to double-guess their leadings. But for me the test of keeping it real (which I think is a ancient Quaker principle) means holding onto oddities that still point to their origins.