maybe The Small Rain influenced a few of Dylan's words in Desolation Row?

[Mark Kohut]

Mark,
           Mine own attempt at a wee bit of possible creative influence...

We know Bob Dylan and TRP knew each other.....(from *Positively Fourth
Street*; because Tom's best buddy Richard Farina married Mimi Baez and
there was Bob and Joan......).....so, thinking back on "The Small Rain",
which Bob might have gone out of his way to find and read then we have
these puzzling lines from
"Desolation Road"....."everybody's making love/ or else expecting rain"
......nice oblique summary of "The Small Rain", yes? ...the  way Bob does
it....


On Sat, Dec 6, 2025 at 9:00 AM <pov at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> I bought it the week it came out. Very excited. But was so disappointed
> reading it—because it didn’t seem to have the gargantuan flash of the
> novelist.
>
> But in the urge to read Pynchon and putting off the big books, I pulled
> it out the other night, and skipping the introduction—which I also did last
> time (I will read it at the end this time however)--started in on “The
> Small Rain”. So great this time around.  As good as it gets. 1959! and
> totally contemporary. Billy Wilder once said to Eric Van Stroheim, whom he
> admired, “You were ten years ahead of your time” and Stroheim paused and
> looked at him and said, “Twenty, Billy, twenty.”
>
>