Subject
Query: the choice of the name "Ada"
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Date
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EDNOTE. Ada's relationship with her father has been the subject of much
speculation. VN was familiar with some of this material and it is not chance
that in the early versions of the novel the male protagonist was named Juan (as
in Byron's "Don Juan." I have discussed Ada's incest theme in an old article
called something like "The Labyrinth of Incest in Ada."
----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 22:34:30 -0300
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
About the movie " Conceiving Ada"
......A Victorian countess is widely credited today as the first
....programmer -- but historians say that doesn't compute.
BY MICHAEL MATTIS
Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, mathematician and English
society hostess, daughter of the poet Byron, is today revered as something
of a prophet. She's been the subject of at least three biographies, numerous
articles, essays and, most recently, a movie starring Tilda Swinton. By one
account, visitors to Ada's grave outnumber those to her father's.
That's not as surprising as at first it seems: Today, technology means more
to most people than poetry, and Ada's fame derives from her collaboration,
in the 1840s, with Charles Babbage -- the cantankerous intellectual who
tried, and failed, to build what might have been the world's first computer,
the Analytical Engine.
For her work with Babbage, Ada has recently been granted such grandiose
monikers as "the world's first programmer," "the mother of computing," "the
mother of the modern computer," "inventor of the first computer language"
and "mathematical genius." She's been distinguished by the United States
Army, which named its universal programming language Ada in her honor in
1983. The book "1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who
Shaped the Millennium" ranks Ada at number 960, coming in for the show right
behind John von Neumann's 959. (Babbage himself galloped ahead of both to
place at number 351. Bill Gates got lost in the backstretch.) She was even
profiled in the official companion book to last year's Lilith Fair.
She's frequently portrayed as a sexual libertine, a compulsive gambler and a
drug addict who despised her children -- a veritable one-woman Thelma and
Louise of primitive computation. "Cyberfeminists" like Sadie Plant, author
of "Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture," hold her up like a
torch, a Byronic martyr to the struggle against a brutal and oppressive
patriarchal technocracy who was intentionally "disappeared" from history.
The image of Ada Lovelace has coalesced into a potent and popular myth, one
in which a complicated personality from the 19th century gets boiled down
into an archetype for the dispossessed of the 20th. This Ada is wild and
powerful and alluring. There's only one problem: According to the experts,
she's a fiction. "This romantically appealing image," writes one scholar,
"is without foundation."
It's the Ada Myth that drives "Conceiving Ada," a film directed by U.C.
Davis arts professor Lynn Hershman Leeson. The plot is a kind of fusion
between cyberpunk and historical drama, with a nod to "Our Bodies,
Ourselves." Emmy (Francesca Faridany) is a computer genius living with her
shaggy boyfriend Nick (J.D. Wolfe) in a groovy Multimedia Gulch warehouse.
Somehow, Emmy programs her computer to look into the past, through which she
voyeuristically watches actress Tilda Swinton do her brooding "Orlando" bit
as the ill-starred supergenius, Ada. As Emmy looks into the past, the
audience is treated to snippets of a decidedly '90s version of Ada's life
struggles against 19th century sexism, laudanum addiction and compulsive
gambling, not to mention her own unstoppable intellect. Eventually, Emmy
conceives -- and thanks to Nick's meddling with Emmy's computer, out pops a
"cybergenetic" clone of Ada herself (Rose Lockwood).
Leeson's Ada, like Plant's, is a misunderstood genius -- a woman born 160
years before her time. She understands Babbage's machines better than
Babbage, encrypts her scarf with ciphers with which to secretly transmit
bets to the racetrack, hobnobs with Mary Shelley, is alternatively wild and
sullen -- maybe even bipolar -- taking lovers on a whim and battling the
patriarchy in the meantime. Leeson insists that everything in her film
concerning Ada is based in fact. She credits "Ada, Enchantress of Numbers:
Prophet of the Computer Age," a collection of Ada's letters and biographical
notes by science historian Betty Alexandra Toole, as a major source. "It's
all true," says Hershman.
"It's a fantasy," counters Toole. "Lynn tells a story which fits her needs
as a filmmaker." Toole also takes umbrage at Plant, who, she says, used her
work as a source to draw a similarly questionable caricature. Given the
textual record, Toole says she's hard-pressed to figure out why modern
people insist on making Ada into a revolutionary, a wanton, a gambler and a
druggie. But she does note that in today's Foucaultian academic world,
transgression is the mode du jour. "It's what we have come to," she says.
"It sells books and movies." It also buys tenure.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 7:14 PM
Subject: Fwd: Query: the choice of the name "Ada"
Dear List,
I've been thinking about the possible origins of the name "Ada", and I
gathered elements from Nabokovian critics, from the List, and from my own
reflections.
I would like to submit them to you. I would be very grateful if you could
give me your opinion on them and suggest further references / possible
origins.
Linguistic echoes in the name itself:
A-da (yes)
Ada (hell, accusative case?? In Russian)
Ada = to wear jewels in Hebrew (adi = jewel) (I ignore if Nabokov was
familiar with Hebrew)
Sound parallels:
Ada / Ardor
Ada / Adora (cf source-text to Ada) / Adorée
Ada / Adam / Eden
It is to be noted that "Ada" is a palindrome (a structure that is based on
symmetry and can thus be related to the numerous mirror effects and doubles
in the novel). As such the name has an unusual stability in Nabokov's use of
language: indeed "Ada" cannot be turned into an anagram.
Intertextual references:
Ada, character from Dickens's Bleak House.
Ada, girl friend mentioned by Alice: "I'm sure I'm not Ada," she said, "for
her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn't go in ringlets at
all." (L. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Norton, 1992, 15)
Painting reference:
Serov's painting, "portrait of Adelaida Simonovich"
Thank you for your help!
Marie Bouchet.
----- End forwarded message -----
----- End forwarded message -----
speculation. VN was familiar with some of this material and it is not chance
that in the early versions of the novel the male protagonist was named Juan (as
in Byron's "Don Juan." I have discussed Ada's incest theme in an old article
called something like "The Labyrinth of Incest in Ada."
----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 22:34:30 -0300
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
About the movie " Conceiving Ada"
......A Victorian countess is widely credited today as the first
....programmer -- but historians say that doesn't compute.
BY MICHAEL MATTIS
Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, mathematician and English
society hostess, daughter of the poet Byron, is today revered as something
of a prophet. She's been the subject of at least three biographies, numerous
articles, essays and, most recently, a movie starring Tilda Swinton. By one
account, visitors to Ada's grave outnumber those to her father's.
That's not as surprising as at first it seems: Today, technology means more
to most people than poetry, and Ada's fame derives from her collaboration,
in the 1840s, with Charles Babbage -- the cantankerous intellectual who
tried, and failed, to build what might have been the world's first computer,
the Analytical Engine.
For her work with Babbage, Ada has recently been granted such grandiose
monikers as "the world's first programmer," "the mother of computing," "the
mother of the modern computer," "inventor of the first computer language"
and "mathematical genius." She's been distinguished by the United States
Army, which named its universal programming language Ada in her honor in
1983. The book "1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who
Shaped the Millennium" ranks Ada at number 960, coming in for the show right
behind John von Neumann's 959. (Babbage himself galloped ahead of both to
place at number 351. Bill Gates got lost in the backstretch.) She was even
profiled in the official companion book to last year's Lilith Fair.
She's frequently portrayed as a sexual libertine, a compulsive gambler and a
drug addict who despised her children -- a veritable one-woman Thelma and
Louise of primitive computation. "Cyberfeminists" like Sadie Plant, author
of "Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture," hold her up like a
torch, a Byronic martyr to the struggle against a brutal and oppressive
patriarchal technocracy who was intentionally "disappeared" from history.
The image of Ada Lovelace has coalesced into a potent and popular myth, one
in which a complicated personality from the 19th century gets boiled down
into an archetype for the dispossessed of the 20th. This Ada is wild and
powerful and alluring. There's only one problem: According to the experts,
she's a fiction. "This romantically appealing image," writes one scholar,
"is without foundation."
It's the Ada Myth that drives "Conceiving Ada," a film directed by U.C.
Davis arts professor Lynn Hershman Leeson. The plot is a kind of fusion
between cyberpunk and historical drama, with a nod to "Our Bodies,
Ourselves." Emmy (Francesca Faridany) is a computer genius living with her
shaggy boyfriend Nick (J.D. Wolfe) in a groovy Multimedia Gulch warehouse.
Somehow, Emmy programs her computer to look into the past, through which she
voyeuristically watches actress Tilda Swinton do her brooding "Orlando" bit
as the ill-starred supergenius, Ada. As Emmy looks into the past, the
audience is treated to snippets of a decidedly '90s version of Ada's life
struggles against 19th century sexism, laudanum addiction and compulsive
gambling, not to mention her own unstoppable intellect. Eventually, Emmy
conceives -- and thanks to Nick's meddling with Emmy's computer, out pops a
"cybergenetic" clone of Ada herself (Rose Lockwood).
Leeson's Ada, like Plant's, is a misunderstood genius -- a woman born 160
years before her time. She understands Babbage's machines better than
Babbage, encrypts her scarf with ciphers with which to secretly transmit
bets to the racetrack, hobnobs with Mary Shelley, is alternatively wild and
sullen -- maybe even bipolar -- taking lovers on a whim and battling the
patriarchy in the meantime. Leeson insists that everything in her film
concerning Ada is based in fact. She credits "Ada, Enchantress of Numbers:
Prophet of the Computer Age," a collection of Ada's letters and biographical
notes by science historian Betty Alexandra Toole, as a major source. "It's
all true," says Hershman.
"It's a fantasy," counters Toole. "Lynn tells a story which fits her needs
as a filmmaker." Toole also takes umbrage at Plant, who, she says, used her
work as a source to draw a similarly questionable caricature. Given the
textual record, Toole says she's hard-pressed to figure out why modern
people insist on making Ada into a revolutionary, a wanton, a gambler and a
druggie. But she does note that in today's Foucaultian academic world,
transgression is the mode du jour. "It's what we have come to," she says.
"It sells books and movies." It also buys tenure.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 7:14 PM
Subject: Fwd: Query: the choice of the name "Ada"
Dear List,
I've been thinking about the possible origins of the name "Ada", and I
gathered elements from Nabokovian critics, from the List, and from my own
reflections.
I would like to submit them to you. I would be very grateful if you could
give me your opinion on them and suggest further references / possible
origins.
Linguistic echoes in the name itself:
A-da (yes)
Ada (hell, accusative case?? In Russian)
Ada = to wear jewels in Hebrew (adi = jewel) (I ignore if Nabokov was
familiar with Hebrew)
Sound parallels:
Ada / Ardor
Ada / Adora (cf source-text to Ada) / Adorée
Ada / Adam / Eden
It is to be noted that "Ada" is a palindrome (a structure that is based on
symmetry and can thus be related to the numerous mirror effects and doubles
in the novel). As such the name has an unusual stability in Nabokov's use of
language: indeed "Ada" cannot be turned into an anagram.
Intertextual references:
Ada, character from Dickens's Bleak House.
Ada, girl friend mentioned by Alice: "I'm sure I'm not Ada," she said, "for
her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn't go in ringlets at
all." (L. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Norton, 1992, 15)
Painting reference:
Serov's painting, "portrait of Adelaida Simonovich"
Thank you for your help!
Marie Bouchet.
----- End forwarded message -----
----- End forwarded message -----
