After some deliberation I have decided to teach myself common lisp. In order to get going with Lisp on ubuntu (and to do it in the traditional way) I had to install emacs along with some other tools like slime (the canonical lisp development environment). Using aptitude for this entire process is possible, but not optimal -- one will end up with an outdated version of slime and Debian will not be packaging lisp tools in the future. The best way to get started with a Lisp system on Ubuntu is to use cbuild.