It appears that Bob Dylan, who's still full of surprises both on tour and on social media, is now pursuing a new side hustle. Today the folk legend shared a promo graphic for a new Patreon series, Lectures From The Grave, on his various accounts. It advertises “lectures” from notable people of yore like Frank James, Aaron Burr, and Wild Bill, as well as imagined "letters never sent.” Bob Dylan’s historical fanfic can be yours to consume for just $5 a month.
The published posts are attributed to different pen names. In a fictional letter credited to "Herbert Foster” and published on Dylan’s Patreon this morning, Mark Twain reaches out to Rudolph Valentino, the Hollywood icon who was 14 when the humorist died in 1910. The letter acknowledges they are both dead. It begins:
Dear Mr. Valentino,
I take up my pen under circumstances that would puzzle the calendar and embarrass the undertaker, for I am told that both of us have already completed the respectable business of dying. Yet if letters can cross oceans, perhaps they may also cross that lesser boundary which divides the living from the historically inconvenienced.
A short story called "Bull Rider," attributed to "Marty Lombard," begins as such:
The bus coughed me out somewhere past Amarillo, dust in my
teeth and a sky that stretched out so wide it felt like it was laughing at
me. I had a duffel bag, two shirts, a paperback of The Sea Wolf with the
spine cracked like an old man’s knuckles, and the kind of hunger you
don’t fix with food.They said there was a rodeo in town… one of those blinking, half-real
places where men go to get thrown and call it glory.I walked.
The road shimmered like it was thinking about disappearing. Trucks
screamed past like prophets who had somewhere better to be. I stuck out
my thumb anyway, but nobody wants a ghost with boots worn through at
the heel.By the time I hit the fairgrounds the sun was hanging low, like it already
knew what would happen next...There were yellow flickering lights strung up everywhere, a cheap
man-made imitation of constellations. The smell hit me first: hay and
sweat and beer tangled together with something sharp and electric
underneath, like the air right before a storm or a bad decision. Men
leaned against fences chewing things they didn’t need. Women moved
like music. Somewhere a radio played a song that forgot its own sadness
halfway through.And then there were the bulls.
Elsewhere on Dylan's Patreon, you'll find a couple of long audio monologues from different seemingly AI-generated voices, one of which Dylan previewed on his Instagram last month:
The first post, however, dates to February, and is just an embed of this video:
A real hodgepodge. You can subscribe to the Patreon here.
