Commentary: an "on-air" essay that conveys an announcer's particular point of view.
When CBS refused to air his essay on the Vietnam war, he left the network and presented it on the Public Broadcasting Service instead, appearing on screen for the first time.
He is the author of two books of criticism, "The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty" and "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy," which may be the most influential works of art theory and appreciation published in the last decade.
W. G. Sebald's brilliant essay "Air War and Literature" ("Luftkrieg und Literatur") brought back that trauma.
He left CBS in 1970 after it refused to air his An Essay on War, which contained statements condemning modern warfare.
He didn't want to talk about his crimes at first, so in a soft voice he told me about his ex-girlfriend, who had stopped visiting him ("I can't blame her"), about what he'd been reading ("Stalingrad," by Antony Beevor; "Into Thin Air," by Jon Krakauer; essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson), about his thoughts on recent high-profile computer breaches in the news.
The essay aired details about her past that she'd long tried to suppress; by posting it on her class's server, where anyone who Googled her name could find it, she thought she might be able to quiet the whispers, the threats, and possibly make it easier to find a job.
Through Feb. 7 With the much-contested subject of a permanent 9/11 monument in the air, this knotty little essay of a show on improvised, often collective responses to urban crises is welcome.
Liu Yazhou, the deputy political commissar of the Chinese Air Force, wrote an essay circulated on Chinese Web sites in May that discussed preparations for conflict with Taiwan and quoted Mr. Jiang as saying, "We must fight a war with Taiwan".
WG Sebald's essay on "Air War and Literature" and the horror of the Allies' carpet-bombing of German cities (included in the book, On the Natural History of Destruction, published in the UK last month) came out in Germany four years ago.
Also, Arvin's Melville has a little too much the genteel air of a review essay that will excuse you from the trouble of reading the novels -- particularly since it scants on biographical facts the novels don't contain (e.g., Arvin neglects to say that Melville's son Malcolm shot himself).
