Life is often experienced as a tedious continuum fragmented by moments of intense feeling or excitement. In Cut up on Copacabana, three sets of texts (‘Travel Notes’, ‘Boxing Rings’ and ‘Schoolboy Rites of Passage’) explore some of these moments in terms of travel, sport and youthful experience recollected later in life. In David Scott’s stories, connections between the hands of Michelangelo’s David and the leaning tower of Pisa, or a scar on the shoulder and the beach at Copacabana, open upunexpected links that, like Hokusai’s prints, provide thirty-six ways of encountering – and accounting for – the fleeting insights life can offer.
David Scott is the author of numerous books on art, boxing, poetry, travel, and graphic design. His novel Dynamo Island: The Cultural History and Geography of a Utopia was published in 2016, while his translation of Mallarmé's sonnets appeared in 2008. He is Emeritus Professor of French (Textual & Visual Studies) at Trinity College Dublin.