To call SW’s managing editor Mike Seely a poet of the dive bar isn’t quite right. Because unlike your more grandiloquent writers, who attempt to elevate mundane subjects—like, say, baseball—into a cerebral sphere, grasping for higher meaning with florid language, Seely meets the dive bar exactly where it is. He knows its vocabulary, its denizens, and most especially, its drink menu. He doesn’t try to fluff it up because he doesn’t have to. He loves dive bars and their regulars exactly for how homely, sketchy, frightening, funny, and comfortably unchanging they are—in a city that (until quite recently) has been piss-drunk on its own wealth. If you saw the excerpt we published two weeks ago, or follow his Bottomfeeder food column, you already know how brilliantly funny he is on paper. Tonight you can perhaps also witness the grunt-like, animalistic vocal delivery he adopts after he’s had a few, as he reads from his new book, Seattle’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking & Diving in the Emerald City (Ig Publishing, $12.95). MARK D. FEFER

Sat., May 30, 4 p.m., 2009