“New Orleans may be more tolerant than other places. Perhaps it is the permissiveness offered by the sub-tropical heat; to own a strip-joint and also be a dedicated churchgoer offers little inner contradiction. It is as if people in the Big Easy take it for granted that humankind is a spiritual house of cards built on flimsy, and therefore is full of contradiction and ready to collapse.” — Norman Mailer

That is my brief tribute to the great American writer, a true believer in the novel. (This quotation, however, comes from his nonfiction work — 791 pages — on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. I bought it at a University of New Orleans book sale today for $1.50.)

Anyhow, this week’s tune will be a little tribute to Mr. Mailer, who I recently heard in an interview from the 1960’s stating that he is not a Christian. I also recently began reading his novel The Gospel According to the Son, which is a retelling of the story of Christ written in first-person. Mailer was a non-Christian who did a great deal of research into the story of Christ. He was something of a contradiction himself, perhaps.

And he got New Orleans right in the above quotation, at least part of New Orleans. What a house of cards we turned out to be.

Anyhow, this week’s tune (the video is behind the cut) is by a man named George Lewis. It is a tune for the non-Christian Mailer who wrote a novel about Christ: George Lewis, "That Rugged Cross." You don’t have to be Christian to like this tune, believe me. I like this guy so much that you might hear him again next week.