December 17, 1995

AS details of a plan endorsed by Gov. George E. Pataki to cut electric rates emerged last week, several trustees of the Long Island Power Authority said they were not prepared to vote on the proposal. The authority's approval would be a required first step in a one-to-two year process that Mr. Pataki said would drive the Long Island Lighting Company from the energy industry on Long Island and reduce rates 12 percent for at least five years. Although 9 of the 15 trustees of the authority are appointees of Mr. Pataki, several appeared to be unwilling to rush ahead with the plan. The majority leader of the State Senate, Joseph L. Bruno, Republican of Rensselaer, and Speaker Sheldon Silver, Democrat of Manhattan, each appointed three trustees.

ASK average Chinese to name their most important goal and the answer will be: a good job; wealth; a visa to America or Europe; more wealth, or a good education. Way down the list, perhaps just below dental work, would be: a democracy movement to change China.

John and Cynthia Gillis already had their special, private garden in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. Now, with the approval of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, they are about to build a house designed to complement their garden, and the neighborhood. It was a decade ago that Mr. Gillis, an architect, and Mrs. Gillis, a landscape designer, rented the Greek Revival house at 360 Pacific Street, with an option to buy the vacant lot next door at 362 Pacific.

Here in the city of Wharton and Mailer and Janowitz, where literary yearnings flourish and fade, there is a subspecies of struggling writer for whom the dream doesn't die and the struggle roils on into old age. These writers defy the stereotype of the striving scribbler: haunter of coffeehouses, pecking away at a PC. Their turf is the senior citizens' centers; Social Security sustains them. But their ambition is the same.

A MONTH OR SO AFTER THE assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the third year of his Presidency, a young White House assistant named Richard Goodwin tried to console Robert Kennedy by saying: "Julius Caesar is an immortal, and he was only emperor of Rome for a little more than three years." "Yes," Bobby said, "but it helps if you have Shakespeare to write about you."