The Sporting Scene TAKING INFIELD by Roger Angell. THE SPORTING SCENE about baseball spring training. The season of 1985 will be the longest in history, thanks to the owners'recent decision to extend the league-championship playoffs. Quotes several players&managers including Bill Rigney, Frank White, Keith Hernandez&Jerry Remy. Vida Blue served a jail term for...

Comment by William McKibben. A report released this week by the East Harlem Interfaith Welfare Committee is full of the usual sad statistics about the poor. But there is one short section about hope, or at least humanity. The anthropologist Anna Lou Dehavenon and a number of volunteers interviewed 1506 people who came to...

Fiction The Buck Starts Here by Veronica Geng. Our attitude is, it is up to Kohl." - A White House official, on the invitation to visit a cemetery in Bitburg where some Nazi SS soldiers are buried. Parody in the form of three letter from the White House staff. The first, to President Mitterrand of France, asks if he...

The Talk of the Town Energy by Kennedy Fraser. Talk story about Livia Sylva, of Livia Sylva's Rumanian-bee pollen skin-care salons for women and for men. She is from the capital of Transylvania&told about her new product: bee pollen capsules, with 93 natural nutrients&a promise of youth&vigor. In Livia Sylva's penthouse...

The Talk of the Town Triples by Lillian Ross. Talk story about writer's experience in a shoe store. She has very narrow feet, and is on an eternal search for shoes in size 8 1/2AAA or 8 1/2AAAA. Very few stores stock them. Writer haunts shoe stores the way a collector hangs around in art galleries. She knows how...

Fiction Old Flames by Laurie Colwin. At a party Freddie Delielle ran into James Clemens, whom she hadn't seen in 2 years. He was wearing a long scarf that she remembered&standing next to a girl so blond&pretty she made Freddie blink. She&James looked so good together that it was hard...

A Reporter at Large THE MOUNTAIN OF NAMES by Alex Shoumatoff. REPORTER AT LARGE about genealogy and the Genealogical Society of Utah-a branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-which has the most voluminous genealogical archives in the world. The age of modern vital-record keeping is considered to have begun in England in 1538. Of...

The Theatre by Edith Oliver.

Fiction Another Pair of Hands by Muriel Spark. Writer's mother lived in a mansion in Sussex. At the end of her life, of all of her servants, she was left with only Winnie, the maid, who, after the death of Miss Spigot the cook, struggled on in deep chaos. She burned food and was unable to keep up...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town Deliverance by William McKibben. Talk story about a meeting at Public School 84, on the upper West Side, marking the end of No TV Week, run by Marie Winn, the author of a study of children and TV. According to Ms. Winn, from caveman times until the TV era, the lives of small children...

Books by Desmond Shawe-Taylor.

The Talk of the Town Uneven Collection by Jane Boutwell. Talk story about Sotheby's auction of 56 well-publicized paintings&drawings-most of them Impressionist-from the estate of the late Florence Gould, who was the daughter-in-law of Jay Gould, one of the great financiers of the 19th century. The audience consisted of 2000 well-headed art...

The Current Cinema THE MUDDLE AGES by Pauline Kael.

Dancing by Arlene Croce.

Poetry All That Is by Richard Wilbur. Twilight approaches, with its last brief spot-lit...