\n<\/p>\n
\n\tOver the past couple of years, Bob Dylan<\/a> has embraced the Internet in bizarre and unexpected ways. He\u2019s used his official Twitter account<\/a> to wish a happy birthday<\/a> to a mysterious figure named \u201cMary Jo\u201d <\/a>he planned on seeing in Frankfort, shouted out<\/a> Dooky Chase\u2019s Restaurant in New Orleans, and talked about running into<\/a> a member of the Buffalo Sabres in an elevator in Prague. His Instagram page<\/a> is rarely used to promote his music, but is instead a hodgepodge of vintage video clips, including Les Paul\u2019s appearance<\/a> at a 1988 Van Halen concert, a James Cagney monologue<\/a> from the 1949 film noir White Heat<\/em>, and even Machine Gun Kelly freestyle rapping at a record store back in 2016.<\/p>\n \n\tBut he somehow managed to up the weirdness by a significant margin over the weekend, when he shared a link to <\/a>an official Bob Dylan Patreon account<\/a> that offers fans \u201ca living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan\u201d for $5.00 a month. The initial offerings includes a \u201cletter never sent\u201d between Mark Twain<\/a> and silent cinema star Rudolph Valentino, claiming to be penned by \u201cHerbert Foster.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cDear Mr. Valentino,\u201d it begins. \u201cI 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.\u201d (It should be noted that Valentino was 14 when Twain died in 1910.)<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s also a seven-page short story entitled \u201cBull Rider,\u201d supposedly written by a \u201cMarty Lombard.\u201d \u201cThe 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,\u201d it begins. \u201cI had a duffel bag, two shirts, a paperback of The Sea Wolf<\/em> with the spine cracked like an old man\u2019s knuckles, and the kind of hunger you don\u2019t fix with food. They said there was a rodeo in town\u2026 one of those blinking, half-real places where men go to get thrown and call it glory.\u201d<\/p>\n