Bob Dylan Joins Patreon With Historical Fanfic

It appears that Bob Dylan, who's still out here on tour, is now pursuing a new side hustle. Today the folk legend shared a link to his Instagram Stories and an accompanying promo graphic for his new Patreon series, Lectures From The Grave, which features original "letters never sent" from notable people of yore like Frank James, Aaron Burr, and Wild Bill. This historical fanfic can be yours to consume for just $5 a month.

We're assuming this is Dylan's actual Patreon and he's not boosting an imposter, though the letters published are attributed to different pen names. In one, written by an author named "Herbert Foster," Mark Twain reaches out to old Hollywood icon Rudolph Valentino:

Should this letter somehow reach your celestial address, I would be pleased to know how it feels to be remembered chiefly for romance. Authors are remembered for sentences, which is a far less flattering business; readers take them apart, quote them badly, and blame the writer when they grow old-fashioned.

If you encounter any newspapermen where you are, kindly remind them that rumors of my permanent silence were, as ever, exaggerated. And if the afterlife provides a theater, I should like to attend one of your pictures. I suspect it would be the only performance in which the audience applauds without insisting upon a moral.

Another short story called "Bull Rider," attributed to somebody named "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:

The first post, however, dates to February, and is just an embed of this video:

A real hodge-podge. You can subscribe to the Patreon here.