I found out about Ted because he hired my future mother-in-law, Bess Hawes, at Valley State. What valley is so well known it doesn't even have to say its name- the San Fernando Valley. The college has since been renamed California State University at Northridge after an adjacent housing project. He left before I made in to CSUN in 1973, but I worked out of a large 35mm film projection room he built. That was about the time Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me came out, a book that changed my life as it did many other peoples'. I met Ted a few years later after I had moved to Boston and started working in ethnographic film, but he was essentially a mystic figure to me. Like many people, I wondered why nobody ever made a film about Ted, probably the clearest thinker about media. If you said, "Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me" in a group of people, they would either look at you as if you were crazy, or spontaneously declare that it was the most important book they ever read. So it was quite a shock to find myself making a film with Harald Prins about our mutual guru, a film that Ted generously let us name after his pivotal book, Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me.
The complete text of Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me can be found on Mike Wesch's web site devoted to Ted, Virtual Snow. This site has a complete bibliography and additional articles by Ted. The DVD of the film Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me also has the complete text of the book plus articles and interviews about Carpenter and making of the film.
This web site has the following Carpenter links--
Twilight of the University by Edmund Carpenter (PDF)
Edmund Carpenter:Explorations in Media & Anthropology by Harald Prins & john Bishop Visual Anthropology Review 17(2) Fall/Winter 2001-2002
Excerpts from Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me by Edmund Carpenter (PDF)
Oh,What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! Edmund Carpenter annotated transcript of the film(PDF)
Papua New Guinea photographs by Adelaide de Menil from 1971
In the future we hope to add PDF editions of two other Carpenter books, Eskimo Realities and They Became What They Beheld.