On Faulkner's Crumble and the Ensuing Tumble for Us All

I always used to laugh
when literary superheroes
sold out and started writing
scripts for Hollywood.

Take Faulkner, for example.
A damn good writer was he.

In one fell swoop, he sold
everything he'd spent a
lifetime building and
burned his entire
reputation to the ground for
a little money and fame.

I spoke with him once after
he started working for Howard Hawks.
He was drinking (of course),
and he said he could return to
Mississippi literally, but that
in his mind he'd left Mississippi for good
and that was the worst thing he'd ever done.

I just laughed then, not knowing what would
become of the literary world.

Nowadays, you can't get literature and greed
to stop copulating
in the public eye, not even if you squirt them
twixt their nethers with a firehose.
And there
aren't even any literary superheroes
left to let you down.