February 21, 1982

Two years ago a builder from Bayside, Queens, bought an odd-shaped parcel of land in a prime location in the Kew Gardens section of his borough. He paid $30,000. The lot had at one time been part of land laid out as a street. But the street was never built and, eventually, the city sold the land at auction as surplus property. For years, the land lay idle because it was so near the Long Island Rail Road tracks. Then the Bayside builder, Charles J. Belanich, came along.

SOUNDING THE TERRITORY By Laurel Goldman. 307 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $13.50. IN life we are frequently confounded by the pathos and even the malevolence of the mad; in imaginative literature, by their sensitivity, wisdom and flights of poetic insight. American literature in particular has celebrated the madman as visionary: the rebel, the nonconformist, the prophet, the victim of the abyss who, like Melville's tragic Pip, has ''seen God's foot upon the treadle of the loom'' and can never return to the comforts of sanity again. Novels of the postwar era - most famously ''Catch-22'' and ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' employ engagingly mad narrators to bring into question the sanity of society; more recently, authors of such novels as ''I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,'' ''Birdy'' and ''Endless Love'' have succeeded not only in presenting madness in various degrees but in giving it a voice - or voices. These novels are, among other things, triumphs of style.

ALBANY THE State of New York could become a major taxpayer to Long Island school districts and county governments under a new proposal recently unveiled here. The State Board of Equalization and Assessment would like thousands of acres of state parkland, open space, state university campuses and large hospital complexes on the Island - 32,294 acres in all - to be subject to all local property taxes. When phased in after five years, the plan would produce nearly $28 million on the Island, $3.4 million in Nassau and $24.3 million in Suffolk, the board predicted. The plan is designed to end the quiltwork of special acts of the Legislature and exceptions that allows some local governments to tax some state-owned lands while barring taxes on other portions of the 3.72 million acres of land owned by the state.

CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE BUCKING the tide that has swept most of the rest of the state and country, Cape May County has been undergoing considerable housing development in recent years. In the face of this, state and private environmentalists have tried to preserve the county's scenic and ecologically sensitive areas. One problem, environmentalists say, is that a law designed to prevent haphazard development in wetlands is being circumvented or ignored. New figures provided by the county's Planning Board last week show that both the population and the number of new dwelling units rose about 38 percent between 1970 and 1981. There are now 82,000 residents and 73,337 houses, apartments and condominiums in the county (hotels and motels are not included in the statistics).

John Bagley scored 35 points, 21 in the second half, to lead Boston College to a 90-81 Big East victory over St. John's yesterday at Alumni Hall in Queens. ''He was super,'' Lou Carnesecca, the St. John's coach, said of Bagley. ''It was some exhibition with shots underneath, outside, left-handed and right-handed.'' Bagley, a 6-foot junior guard, equaled his single-game career high in scoring as Boston College, trailing by 3 at halftime, scored 56 points in the second half. He scored 35 points against Wake Forest in the second round of the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament last year.