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” Hickok, as well as short stories and imagined “letters never sent.” Bob Dylan’s historical fanfic can be yours to consume for just $5 a month.
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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.
Also published today is a short story titled Bull Rider, attributed to “Marty Lombard.” It begins:
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.
The aforementioned lectures from the afterlife are long audio monologues in different male voices. Aaron Burr: On The Art Of Survival runs for 70 minutes and Dylan previewed that on his Instagram in a couple of posts last year. Dylan previewed the hour-long Wild Bill one on his Instagram last month:
The first post, on the other hand, is just an embed of Mahalia Jackson performing on The Sullivan Show from the program’s official YouTube:
A real hodgepodge. The graphic, writing, and audio all bear the hallmarks of AI slop — though whether the Nobel Prize In Literature recipient used any AI tools remains unclear. You can subscribe to the Patreon here.
