Alan is often criticized for this and that – too much drinking, or that he was a ‘mere’ popularizer. But give me a break! Yeats said of Oscar Wilde, that he left at least half his work in conversation. I say the same thing about Alan. He was a brilliant talker. He took the Bay Area by storm, starting in the early 50s. We had a very liberal NPR radio station and television station, on both of which he became a star. He was as good an extemporaneous conversationalist as I’ve ever met. Endlessly charming, he could be very amusing. To say he’s nothing but a popularizer is an injustice. With DT Suzuki he was the most salient popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the 50s and 60s.

Alan was a huge influence on Bay Area culture because he was so insightful, funny and witty. But not sarcastic. He was generous and very playful. His weaknesses were on the side of impulse control, not on the side of cruelty snark. He was fun and he was brilliant. Aesthetics were huge for Alan – he could have been a professor of aesthetics like John Ruskin. He was a great appreciator of beauty – costume, cooking, architecture, Feng Shui, clothes, costumes, poetry.