Category Archives: anthypophora

Anthypophora (an’-thi-po’-phor-a): A figure of reasoning in which one asks and then immediately answers one’s own questions (or raises and then settles imaginary objections). Reasoning aloud. Anthypophora sometimes takes the form of asking the audience or one’s adversary what can be said on a matter, and thus can involve both anacoenosis and apostrophe.

“You may wonder why I’m standing here with a paper bag pulled over my head. Well, surprise! I’m not going shopping!” This was the opening to my first lecture of the semester. It was an English literature course on the oddball writer/philosopher Vaslov “Swordfish” McNulty. He was famous for writing 300-page tomes about nothing. His final book “I Can’t Get a Grip,” won the 2015 Hefty Preface Award, for the longest and most obtuse “Introduction” to a work of fiction. McNulty’s Introduction to “Underpants Eclipsing” was 150 pages long and written in extended similes—like a train-track to nowhere, like a pothole in an invisible highway. Many thought it should’ve won the 2025 Hefty.

I pulled the bag off my head, but there was another bag underneath. It was a shopping bag I had purchased at Hannaford supermarket. It was ornately printed with flowers, a big red barn, and vegetables. Like the other bag, I had cut out eye holes in it.

I said “Underneath. We do not know anything until we know what’s underneath. What’s buried. What’s occluded. What’s covered. What’s underneath.” I ripped off the Hannaford bag. Underneath, I was wearing a balaclava like a thief, or murderer, or an ICE agent wears. I brandished my Swiss Army knife. The sudden unveiling shocked some of the students. One young man in the front row tucked his hands in his armpits and flapped his arms like a bird and mooed like a cow. Another young man started jogging in place. A young woman dumped her backpack out on the floor, stood up, and started stomping on the contents. Numerous other bizarre activities took place, until the entire class was weirding out.

A shoe flew by my head. I closed my Swiss Army knife, and I pulled the balaclava off. The commotion ceased immediately. The students stared, mouths hanging open, fear and weirdness were replaced by awe.

I had a Sufi winged heart tattooed on my forehead. I had a flying saucer on my right cheek and Cher on my left cheek. I had a target on my chin and a question mark on either eyelid. I said, “My face is an aggregate of hope and fear. It weighs the ambiguity of value on its own idiosyncratic scales. At once, it projects the dialectical tensions of idiocy and genius and fabricates a surface for posing wonder.”

Then, I tore off the tattoo mask and revealed my own face. The students groaned with disappointment and one or two even booed. I am a pasty-faced bookworm who never goes outside. My face is shiny and belies my Scandinavian heritage. My last name is Godson, and I take it seriously. I ask my students: “Can you take your masks off? No! You can’t. Without your mask you would have no face—nothing to save, nothing to lose. Nothing to punctuate your life with or register your placidity and anxiety. Like Swordfish, you would be drowning in a sea of non-sequiturs, and, more bluntly, bullshit.

This semester, you will wear bags over your heads to every class. You will not get to know each other. For all we know, a serial killer may sneak in with a desire to kill one of us, or all of us. But, we will learn to trust each other, like Swordfish’s protagonist trusted the hotel doorman to open the door for him and hold it open until he entered the hotel, a key moment in ‘Floating Frozen Turkeys,’ perhaps his most ambitious work. Spanning 9,142 pages, nobody has ever read it all the way through, cleverly protecting it from the back-stabbing insults of literary critics who nearly universally condemn Swordfish’s works as vile, tautological, trivial, vice-ridden, incomprehensible, insulting, liberal, ersatz, puerile, and makeshift. This semester, you will become the bags over your heads.”

The students seemed eager to proceed. I looked forward to the experiment. Yes, it was an experiment. The next class-meeting would be the beginning of my revolution in University teaching—I would win the State University at Cowbridge award for “Believable Instruction” and get tenure. I could marry the student I’ve been living with since her Freshman year. Things were looking up. Then I got the news. One of my students was trying on bags at Hannaford’s and was mistaken for a robber. He was shot 12 times by the newly hired bipolar security guard. Since I had required my students to wear bags over their heads, I was charged with conspiracy to commit robbery. I am serving a one-year sentence. During my trial I was known in the newspapers as “Professor Bag Man.”

The students staged a demonstration protesting my conviction and proclaiming my innocence. They all wore bags over their heads and chanted “We are the paper bags over our heads.” The demonstrations were ineffective. It rained and the bags turned into paper mush. No more bags, no more protest. That was it. Here I am. I have decorated my cell with paper bags. I am grateful to the prison authorities for allowing me to do so.

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.

Anthypophora (an’-thi-po’-phor-a): A figure of reasoning in which one asks and then immediately answers one’s own questions (or raises and then settles imaginary objections). Reasoning aloud. Anthypophora sometimes takes the form of asking the audience or one’s adversary what can be said on a matter, and thus can involve both anacoenosis and apostrophe.

Am I going to die? No! I take “Spinning Melon” organic extract everyday. The “This Product Contains” label on the bottle says “censored,” which makes it illegal to sell. Although I pay money for it, it is not technically buying, according to the manufacturers. They call it donating to their LLC “Fountain of Yule.”

I had a friend who took “Spinning Melon” every day. He said he was 96, but he looked like a teenager. He said he hung out with Perry Como back in the day. He had an affair with Cuomo’s wife and the local Mafia was hired to hit him. He stopped taking “Spinning Melon” for a week and he turned so old the hitters couldn’t recognize him. He got out of New York and escaped death. He moved to Las Vegas, started taking “Spinning Melon” again and went to work for Wayne Newton. He wrote “Danke Schone” and talked Newton into singing it. It was a hit and Newton was so grateful he paid my friend $5,000 every time he sang it.

So, of course, I started taking “Spinning Melon.” I was 60 and I looked 29. It was amazing until I found out it was made of babies who had died in their cribs and whose corpses were stolen from morgues and sold to Fountain of Yule. It was too gruesome to be true! I had to investigate. I got a job driving a delivery truck for Fountain of Yule. When I interviewed for the job I had to sit behind a screen. I couldn’t see my interviewer, but I could smell him. He smelled like decaying flesh.

I went around to morgues picking up baby-sized body bags. I was sick. My heart was breaking. I had to look in one of the baby bags. I pulled over, climbed in the back of the truck, and unzipped a bag. It contained a watermelon. Yes, a watermelon! I asked my boss, what the hell was going on. From behind the screen, he told me that watermelon juice was the key ingredient in “Spinning Melon.” But, it was special watermelon grown on Incan garden plots located deep in the jungles of Peru. The export of the watermelons is prohibited, so we disguise them as dead babies packed in body bags. The watermelon juice has regenerative properties. What a relation!

So, I asked my boss why he smelled so bad. He told me he had become addicted to fermented shark while traveling in Iceland. It stinks so bad it is served in sealed jars and eaten as quickly as possible.

I’m still working for Fountain of Yule. I’m as young as ever. I’m in charge of watermelon quality control. I have a girlfriend and have developed a taste for fermented shark. Me and Boss share a fermented shark sandwich every once-in-awhile. I like mine on a hamburger bun with tartar sauce.and iceberg lettuce.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.

Anthypophora (an’-thi-po’-phor-a): A figure of reasoning in which one asks and then immediately answers one’s own questions (or raises and then settles imaginary objections). Reasoning aloud. Anthypophora sometimes takes the form of asking the audience or one’s adversary what can be said on a matter, and thus can involve both anacoenosis and apostrophe.

There is only so much you can do, but you must do something—save money? Spend money! Give it away? No way! Maybe. I don’t know. Stuck again in the tangle of imagined consequences for whatever I do, I don’t have any money or prospects of earning any. I believe money is the fruit of all evil. Accordingly, I am a barter-man. No money, just goods. It’s about trading stuff that is not valued in terms of a price, but valued in terms of another thing—where two separate things are desired by two people. and to some extent have a perceived equal value. Disparities can be filled in by items of lesser value. Like, you might be trading a bicycle for a lawnmower. To bring the bicycle “up to value” you may have to “throw” in a garden tool or a charcoal grill. It’s complicated, but it runs on gut instincts that existed before money scaled value numerically with metallic substitutes—much more portable than things—showing up with a bag of silver instead of a used catapult made things go more easily. But, I don’t give a damn.

I am looking to trade my burial urn. It is unused—ha ha. I am looking for 20 1qt. glass canning jars. I think I have about 10 years to live and would like to make strawberry preserves before I die. After I make 2 or 3 batches, I’ll trade back for another burial urn, and I’ll be good to go. Or, I might keep the jars and use them for my ashes.

Bartering is a real challenge. There’s a newsletter called “Swap It” that lists goods for trade. A few weeks ago it included an ad for “slightly damaged cardboard boxes of government documents for trade in exchange for safe and permanent exile.” They were for trade by John Barron at a post office box in Florida. There was also John Kennedy’s brain. I asked, and they sent me a picture of the brain in a freezer. It looked real, even down to the hole in it. I told them I could trade it for one of the boots John Glen wore when he orbited the earth. I had gotten it in a trade for Jim Morrison’s leather pants that he had been wearing before he fell in the tub with a space heater in Paris. My offer was angrily rejected, because it wasn’t “in kind.” That was a pretty vague dodge, so I did some research. I discovered that the”brain” people had been busted for selling falsely attributed body parts. They were sketchy, but, that’s the risk you deal with when you barter.

My worst experience was trading for Gene Vincent’s leg brace. He was a 50s Rock ‘n Roll singer. I had to have the brace and had a coin operated motorcycle ride—like the ones they used to have in front of grocery stores.—that I wanted to trade. I drove my pick-up with the ride loaded in the back to the Dick’ parking lot where I was supposed to meet the guy with the leg brace to trade. A blue ‘54 Chevy pick-up pulled up. A guy with a balaclava on jumped out swinging the leg brace and yelling “Be-bop I love ya’ Baby!” He smashed my truck’s windshield. He made me get out of my truck and made me help carry the motorcycle ride and load it on his truck.

I sat on my running board an cried. That was all I could do. At that point I decided to scale back on my bartering. Now I make wind chimes and trade them for food, clothing and a little money. I make my wind chimes out of lids from pots and pans, and also, used license plates I get for free at the DMV. I’ve also started rifling through recycling bins for items to trade or making things from. Currently, I’m working on a giant tin aluminum ball and soup can pencil and pen caddies.

AARP is writing an article about me. It’s called “Dismal Days and Nights.” It is about a man who failed to plan for his retirement and has been rejected by his family. Then, he invents a pencil and pen caddy and becomes a millionaire.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.