The East Village coffeehouse circuit directly linked literary and pop figures

Evidence

For a few months that spring, Burroughs was New York’s preeminent literary celebrity. In short order, Ginsberg brought him together with Bob Dylan at an East Village coffeehouse which, were a movie of the event ever made, would have to be Le Metro. Dylan impressed Burroughs with his self-confidence and, increasingly taken with the idea of himself as a writer, gave a late March interview name-checking Burroughs and his cut-up methodology. Indeed, something like Burroughs’s experiments was evident in Dylan’s just-released 45 single, a rollicking, surreal Chuck Berry riff called “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 657

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s causal question — how physical proximity and informal venues (Le Metro coffeehouse) generated collisions between high literature and pop.