DEAR DIARIST.(The Talk of the Town)(composer and author Ned Rorem)(Interview)

Ned Rorem, the composer and author of scandalous diaries, summers on Nantucket, but he ventured into town the other day to give a reading, in connection with the publication of his selected letters. Two days later, retreating from a steamy afternoon to his rent-controlled apartment on West Seventieth Street, he reflected on the experience. Barefoot in khaki shorts, legs crossed, sipping sparkling apple juice from a cordial glass, he reclined on a sofa that faced his collection of portraits of himself. His features conveyed a disappointed nobility. "Nothing could be more egocentric than a person reading his own letters to other people," he said. "But then all art is egocentric. Beethoven assumes that you want to listen to those goddam symphonies of his."

Beethoven is a sore point: almost all of the paltry attention and money that classical musicians are paid these days goes to performers of old standbys, like Beethoven, Mozart, and Dvorak. Rorem still receives many commissions: he just finished an opera based on Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," and he was about to turn his mind to three short choral pieces. Two years ago, when he turned eighty, his birthday was celebrated with concerts all over the world. Still. "It was nothing compared with Paris Hilton," he said. A world so debased is one in which Rorem has only limited interest. "I don't go to concerts much," he said. "I've heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I've read everything."

But if New York's culture no longer draws him, the allure of its medical opportunities remains fresh. Rorem has long been, by his own admission, a dedicated hypochondriac, although both of his parents lived heartily into their nineties and he himself appears twenty years younger than he is. He spends a great deal of his time with doctors. Earlier that afternoon, for instance, he had had his left ear scanned. His letters are filled with news of bodily affliction: a sore throat, a broken ankle, a bee sting on his knee, flu, hay fever, insomnia, an unspecified urethra condition, a left forefinger cut while opening a can of cat ...