January 19, 1986

Laboratory tests showed that the three polyps removed Friday from President Reagan's colon were benign, the White House announced today. Tests also showed that tissue from a small growth on the right side of Mr. Reagan's face was benign, the White House added. Mr. Reagan, spending the weekend at the Presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., was informed of the results by his physician this morning. 'All Are Benign' Albert R. Brashear, a White House spokesman, said there would be no further comment on the results of the medical examination Mr. Reagan underwent Friday for nearly six hours at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. It was the President's most comprehensive examination since his surgery last July for a cancerous polyp in his bowel.

The august Metropolitan Opera is the home of the world's greatest operas and the world's largest, greatest opera singers. Here a couple happily pays $130 in tickets for an evening's entertainment and, they earnestly hope, enlightenment. Back home, their children, the babysitter and the babysitter's boyfriend loll about mesmerized by MTV, which is shorthand for Music Television. Ceaselessly, this 24-hour cable outlet spews forth rock songs with visual accompaniments, cutting from the band lip-synching not quite in synch to some paltry little scenario involving blow-dried, fashion-model fantasies and a few computerized special effects. A reasonable person might conclude that opera and music videos have nothing in common; that they represent cultural forces so opposed that the lovers of one couldn't hope to find solace in the other. The two forms do indeed remain widely disparate today, with different traditions, different musical styles and an altogether different degree of magnitude and, usually, aspiration.

A WHILE ago I was asked to write the introduction to a book of short stories by contemporary New England writers and to consider the question of regional writing. My first thought was that all serious writing, from anywhere, so far transcends the regional that the question didn't warrant discussion. I hardly ever think whether fiction from New England is different from Middle Western fiction or Southwestern fiction or whatever fiction. Real writers - the writers who write serious rather than formula fiction - use the images at their fingertips, whatever they are, to give us experience and after that, we hope, some truth. Thirty years ago Henry Steele Commager, in his essay ''The Nature of American Nationalism,'' said that American love of country has always been ''a curiously general affair, almost an abstract one. Few Americans have [ a ] passionate attachment to a particular soil, a particular county or region.'' He went on to say, ''We have a regional literature, but it is rather a tribute to the passing of genuine regionalism than an expression of it.''

The newest stars of Albany are eight glittering chandeliers that were recently hung in the Hampton Plaza development on State Street as part of the rehabilitation of the building. They also are symbols of the economic revival of the downtown area.

AN INFLUENTIAL panel appointed by Governor Kean has called for a wide range of state programs to reduce the incidence of mental retardation in New Jersey, including stepped-up efforts to prevent teen-age pregnancies and establishing school-based health clinics in areas with high concentrations of poor children. The panel, the Governor's Council on the Prevention of Mental Retardation, spelled out its recommendations in a 338-page report released last month. According to the report, some 30,000 to 40,000 state residents suffer from mental retardation so severe as to require lifelong care or supervision. Twice as many are mildly retarded and can live independently or semi-independently.