HOW READING CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Back to Robinson in Space:

After Robinson published the results of his study of London, I didn't see him again for a long time, but I heard that he had been dismissed from his university position, and after a period in which he sank into a deep depression, had taken a part-time job teaching English in a language school in Reading, where he was now living.

But why choose Reading? Keiller, in his footnotes to the film, explains:

Robinson's decision to move to Reading was reinforced by his hasty misreading of Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall [Berkeley, 1984]): 'Reading frees itself from the soil that determines it' and 'Reading is ... a place constituted by a system of signs' (pp. 117, 176). Indeed, his entire project was inspired by this book: 'Every story is a travel story - a spatial practice' (p. 115).

Hehe...