"I feel like Lauren Berlant assaulted me."

So noted the Sophisticate as we waited in the hall before biography class, offering perhaps the most memorable formulation of an opinion I heard again and again after Prof. Berlant's lecture this afternoon.

It was a torrent of words. I was sitting among a whole group of compulsive notetakers, next to the Medievalist — who stops just short of transcribing the entire lecture — and it was amusing to watch them try, and fail, to keep up with Berlant's stemwinder.

I think the Medievalist is actually broken now, in some critical way. She was one of the last holdouts, still trying to get it all down half an hour into the lecture, but she soon cracked, as we all cracked under the weight of the many adjectives, the evolving and invariably crucial-seeming observations. The words.

The last page of her notes for today has an elaborate drawing of some flowers.

My notes were less ambitious, but then again they always are. They're mostly a collection of sentences too long to write down before I forgot them, some garbled definitions of key terms like "cruel optimism" and "fantasy," observations to blog later (cleverly coded "tb"), and some notions that for one reason or another stood out from the intellectual white noise of the lecture as a whole.

"A personality is a commitment to being reliable for others" really speaks to me. It could easily be the epigraph for some chapter in the story of my life.

Oh, and boxes. My notes these days are covered with tiny boxes.

Prof. Berlant, if you don't know, is (apparently) a professor of some stature in the English department here. She's got a knack for using pop culture in an academic, (yet) not at all shallow way: today's lecture was ostensibly about her essay "Unfeeling Kerry," which has my respect if not my complete agreement. I praised her Simpsons essay in a post earlier this week, with a similar qualification.

Another fragment: "voting for the idea of the political."

In addition to her official webpage and a write-up in the Chronicle (with a more recent photo), Berlant even has a predictably mediocre Wikipedia page, which signals to netizens that she has well and truly arrived.

So why would such an experienced educator talk so quickly?

The lecture struck me as designed to impress and inform rather than teach, but that's not necessarily the best explanation. It could be that (as she admitted up front) Prof. Berlant isn't used to reading from a prepared text. It could be that it was more important to her that we listen — and we were all certainly listening by the end, even if we didn't quite grasp it all — instead of trying to get it all down.

Our Bold Hero even hinted at a Lacanian motive lurking behind the lecture, lessons hidden in what Berlant wasn't doing. I'm not sure if he was joking.