On December 1, 1978, John Cage read from his Writing for a Second Time through Finnegans Wake on stage at the Entermedia Theatre. The occasion for the performance was the Nova Convention. Yet while the Nova Convention did focus on Burroughs's reputation as a “literary outlaw,” it also featured many more artists from the “American rhizome.” Cage's performance at the Nova Convention attempted to cut up the words in James Joyce's last text. Burroughs himself associated Cage with the cut-up method on more than one occasion. In a response to a question on the novelty of the method, Burroughs acknowledged “cut-ups have been in use for many years now. People like John Cage have been using them in music.” He noted elsewhere that “Cage and Earle Brown have carried [cut-ups] further in music than it's ever been carried in writing.” The Nova Convention placed Cage and other New York avantgardes in close proximity to Burroughs's writing.

Yet by 1978 Burroughs used the cut-up method less frequently in his own writing and began to focus more on “straightforward narrative.” It is worth noting that the book Burroughs uses to distance himself from his previous experiments was the very text Cage writes-through at the Nova Convention. As Burroughs tells Daniel Odier, “I think Finnegans Wake rather represents a trap into which experimental writing can fall when it becomes purely experimental.” Burroughs instead notes his own restraint: “I would only go so far with any given experiment and then come back.”