How would I get a list of posts from a custom post type

by 

$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'carousel',
    'suppress_filters' => 0,
    'numberposts' => -1,
    'order' => 'ASC'
);
$content_block = get_posts( $args );  // there was a typo in this line
var_dump($content_block); // it should work fine now

PS. I’m not sure why do you need “an object” and you can’t do it with custom WP_Query. In the end, get_posts function builds custom WP_Query and returns result of it… 😉

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/3.5.2/wp-includes/post.php#L1723