In the 80s I decided to embrace this form of writing. I started publishing
“Swift's Eye.” Named after Jonathan Swift, an English satirist who probably did
a few pamphlets himself besides writing clever books like “Gulliver's Travels.”
So while I scribbled witty satirical short stories and labored on numerous blockbuster books, I took time to pen some clever and biting political rhetoric
and put them in a handy, user-friendly form. A paper pamphlet.
As a side note, I thought I was really clever because part of their charm was
that I tried different folding techniques for the pamphlet. Most were fold in
half, then in half again, but I once tried a tri-fold, often set a page up that
required it be completely unfolded and often ran typed across folds. Okay, it
might not have been that clever.
I created them on a typewriter so I always had to have a mock up in order to
know how far to type and whether I needed to turn the page upside down to type
the next page (because of the fold). There were some pages I used what is
called “press type” as you have to press it down with a special tool. It's a real
slow process and you had to use something to make sure it was level. So this
pamphlet was pretty labor intensive. Nowadays it would be so easy with the use
of a computer, but back then about the only people with those were engineers,
computer programmers and a few rich people.
Like the colonial time pamphleteers, Swift Eye was political. I mainly attacked
Reagan, but often had something about the environment or other hot topics of
the time. Of course, as a satirical short story writer, most of the time it was
funny or humorous. My favorite one was the one that made fun of Reagan's wife
penchant to turn to astrology for answers.
In total, I think I only had five to six issues of Swift’s Eye. I liked doing
them, but because they were so labor intensive and I never thought they made as
big of an impact as I desired, I lost interest in the mode. Instead, I just
hunkered down and put more energy in putting the same ideas and concepts in my short stories. Many of those got published and to keep them alive I included them
on my web site so they’ll live on in the electronic world for years.
